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Agricultural chaos
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-24
Monday June 12^th 2006 – Sunday June 18^th 2006

POLICY contradictions and chaos that has characterised government’s controversial land reforms continued to attract media attention in the week.

The government media featured 44 stories on the subject (ZBH 31 and government papers 13) while private papers carried 17.

All the official media’s stories were basically piecemeal and failed to give a clear picture of the exact situation on the ground. For example, while they recorded three incidents of farm evictions – perpetrated by either government or ruling party leaders against white commercial farmers and newly resettled ones – they failed to view them as a reflection of the chaos bedevilling agriculture or attribute them to government’s land policies.

Consequently, The Herald (16/6) did not find any irony when it reported Deputy Agriculture Minister Sylvester Nguni calling on tobacco farmers to "concentrate on production without fear of being removed from the farms as the government will not allow disruption".

This was particularly so since the previous day the paper reported the High Court ordering ZANU PF officials Fredrick Shava and Shaddy Sai to "leave a farm" they had occupied in April without serving any "notice" to the farm-owners.

By the weekend, The Sunday Mail (18/6) also unquestioningly reported government issuing an "eviction notice" to the owners of Dundazi Farm ordering them to "vacate the property after 90 days" or face "prosecution". The development, the paper revealed, "comes hard on the heels of a High Court order, which stated that the farm owners should continue to conduct operations on the property without interference".

In a related matter, the paper reported that the owner of Jijima Farm, Langton Masunda, had to seek protection from the High Court after ZANU PF chairman John Nkomo threatened to send "soldiers" to evict him following his futile attempts to seize the property in the past year.

But despite such revelations, the papers did not interpret them as indicative of the complete disregard for the rule of law, which has largely marked the country’s land reforms in the past six years. Otherwise, they carried eight other stories that sought to portray government as taking measures to improve productivity on the farms.

The national broadcaster ignored the evictions altogether.

Instead, its stories tried to project the agricultural sector as enjoying a clean bill of health despite contrary views from farmers.

For instance, while ZBH depicted farmers as unhappy over the sorry state of agriculture, ranging from the alleged unsatisfactory payment of their tobacco crop proceeds at the official exchange rate, to government’s continued poor management of the sector, it continued to present the situation in the sector as smooth (ZTV 12/6, 7am; 16/6,8pm).

The sourcing pattern of the government media is shown in Fig 1 and 2.

Fig. 1 Voice Distribution on ZBH

Fig. 2 Voice distribution in the government Press

In contrast, the private papers continued to diagnose the problems bedevilling agriculture, which they categorically blamed on poor government policies.

For example, The Financial Gazette (15/6) castigated government for failing to put an end to corruption, multiple-farm ownership and illegal seizures of farms and equipment by senior government officials. It argued that such failures illustrated government’s selective application of the law "or most importantly, (that) the prosecutorial and investigative decisions must be made from the highest office. In which case it becomes a question of President Robert Mugabe’s blind eye!"

To emphasis its point, it reported one farm invasion in which it said, "gangs loyal to ZANU PF had raided" a banana estate in Chimanimani and destroyed 7,5 hectares of bananas worth more than $1billion. The paper noted that such actions fly "in the face of government’s undertaking to block farm seizures".

The Zimbabwe Independent (16/6) revealed that while most resettled farmers struggle to access farming equipment, Agricultural Minister Joseph Made, "who has been fingered as one of the five ministers who looted equipment from Kondozi Estate", was "stashing" a "fleet of tractors and an array of farming equipment" at his Headlands farm.

However, although the paper tried to link the story to reports on the seizure of farming machinery by government officials, it did not establish whether some of the equipment on Made’s farm was actually part of the loot.

Meanwhile, The Daily Mirror (12/6) passively reported Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa claiming that government had begun compensating white farmers without independently verifying such revelations. Neither did it determine the amount the farmers were to receive. The private papers’ sourcing pattern is illustrated in Fig 3.

Fig 3. Voice distribution in the private Press

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