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Land reform

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 above certain size. This would force holders of land to hand excess amounts back to the state or would it. It is true that this could have been circumvented as a policy, since holders of land would just subdivide their tracts and create legal entities to hold their land under, thus avoiding the tax and avoiding the aim of the policy to redistribute land.

All in all, I believe leaders around the world must understand that Land reform is a necessity, just as a check on unbridled capitalism will be a necessity soon. I have now read a second review from independent researchers that have indicated that the reform in Zimbabwe was not as fatal as is propagated in the western media http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-05-20-time-to-ditch-the-disaster-scenarios . So is there sense to the conspiracy theories as articulated by Zanu pf? MAybe, maybe not ? What is true, not only for Zimbabwe but the rest of the world where a racist capitalist agenda has set up the status quo, something has to give to address the inequities of the past.

Something tells me the truth about land reform lies somewhere in the middle of the polarized opinions under a very large pile of propaganda.

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