A Critic of Zimbabwes Current Land Redistribution Programme

Abstract

The history of land distribution was such that 1% of the white population was in possession of all the productive land in Zimbabwe and so in 2000 there was a Fast Track land reform programme that occurred to address this issue. Land reform was necessary for the people of Zimbabwe considering the Zimbabwean situation, redistribution of land had to be done in order to balance out the unevenly distributed land between the white minority and black majority. It is for this reason that the war veterans led an Agrarian revolution in 2000 which saw white commercial farmers removed from their farms by force. The claim is that the model used for distribution is not as transparent as it should be hence social justice was not served. Another issue is that after the distribution that was done there seems to be a lot of farms that are not being utilized to their maximum capacity and some of them are not being utilized at all. The purpose of this study is to examine the methods used for land distribution in Zimbabwe as a model for distributive justice. As well as investigate some of the issues regarding land Reform and analyse the criteria used to allocate land, having done this the study will through collection of data and analysis come up with a model that can be effective in the distribution of land in the Zimbabwean context. Guided by the concept of distributive justice that has one of its basic principles emphasizing land being allocated based on merit, some of the findings showed that this was not being done and entirely emphasized. The nature of the current model allows for a lot of loopholes for corruption because of the decentralisation of the land committee hence through analysis of data collected, this research recommended a new model for land allocation to allow for transparency in the land reform process.