Restitution versus Populism: Revisiting the Dominant Tropes of the Land Question in Zimbabwe

摘要

Zimbabwe’s land revolution at the turn of the millennia cast the country on the international spotlight for a myriad of reasons, ranging from laudatory admiration to negative criticism and bad publicity. Narratives and doomsday predictions of economic disaster, social upheaval and ultimately internal implosion were awash and not of f the mark g i ve n the manner in which the political economic status quo was shaken and restructured. The Fast Track Land Reform (FTLRP) was hailed in some quarters as the long overdue corrective measure against historical injustices while other sections castigated it as chauvinistic and fascist machinations of a capricious regime battling for political survival. These ensuing contestations around land expropriation are not an aberration in that they form part of a repertoire of the languages of life and / or the teleology in the history and transition of post colonies with settler heritage. Land reform continues to gain policy traction in much of the devel oping South with a colonial history where the economic logic of settlerism was the dominant mode of exploitation, expropriation and accumulation. Widening inequality in much of the developing South particularly in post settler economies in southern Africa has heightened demands for greater access to land and other productive sectors putting land as another new frontier of conflict. Therefore the question remains, is land reform being driven by a genuine desire for restitution and a progressive redress of colonial wrongs or whether it is just another pretext for populist demagoguery and patronage politics? This paper posits that these two dominant tropes are deeply interwoven within Zimbabwe’s political economics fabric within its transition as a post colony and the matter is much more complex and cannot be reduced to such binary terms of reference. The paper therefore traces the trajectory of land reform in Zimbabwe since independence until the turn of the millennia and the attendant policy contradictions, constraints and rationalities that undergird land expropriation and redistribution.