My view

A topic that has a very polarized response in Africa. There are largely two camps to the argument of land reform: either you are for it or against it. Empowerment in its most practical form is discriminative. Why do I say this? Well to get one group of people to catch up to the rest of society, one can do one of two things: 1. Exclude the rest of society from competing with the group you want to empower, or 2. Take a portion of resources from the privileged and redistribute to the under privileged. Zimbabwe in the land reform programme chose the latter. Because this was done in a manner that did not prescribe to international standards and indeed people were viciously removed to attain some sort of land parity, Zimbabwe has been vilified. Was the ideal of land reform correct? Yes. Was how it was done correct? I believe the answer is no. Redistribution could have been carried out in a more humane manner. One example would have been to institute a prohibitive land tax on tracts of land