Published by the government of Zimbabwe
29 April 2008
Harare — The case in which white former commercial farmers are seeking to halt compulsory land acquisition in Zimbabwe is set to resume in Namibia next month with the Attorney-General's Office expected to raise concerns about the manner in which the Sadc Tribunal has handled the matter so far.
The farmers applied to the Sadc Tribunal using Article 28 of the Protocol of the Tribunal as read with provisions of the Sadc Treaty to stop the State from compulsorily acquiring their farms in terms of the country's relevant land laws.
On March 28, the tribunal granted the farmers interim relief against eviction, but an official in the AG's Office has said the regional court erred in its judgment.
Efforts to get a comment from Deputy AG Mr Prince Machaya (Civil Division) were fruitless, but The Herald is reliably informed that Zimbabwe -- as the first respondent -- would seek to prove that the farmers unprocedurally filed their application for relief.
It is understood that the AG's Office, in conjunction with the Ministry of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, has set up special teams to look at different aspects of the case and prepare the Republic of Zimbabwe for the May court proceedings.
"There are two issues that we will ask the Tribunal to reconsider. The first is to do with the manner in which the white farmers consolidated their application; and the second is to do with the involvement of Mike Campbell.
"As you know, Mr Campbell was the first white farmer to approach the tribunal and the court granted him interim relief against eviction.
"However, his fellow white farmers have listed him as a respondent in their application. How can a person be an applicant and a respondent at the same time? It does not make sense at all.
"In fact, Mr Campbell is listed as a second respondent, as Mike Campbell (Pvt) Ltd, in another application and Mr William Michael Campbell as a third respondent in yet another application.
"Secondly, for them to consolidate their application they should have first filed their papers with the Tribunal individually. They did not do this. They lumped their action and argued that a precedent had been set in the Campbell case and sought similar relief and yet they still list the same Campbell as a respondent.
"Furthermore, they did not prove how their case was urgent. Land reforms have been going on for a long time and now suddenly the matter is urgent after eight years of peaceful co-existence with the State because an election is due," an official in the AG's Office said.
The official also said they were not satisfied with the tribunal's contention that the farmers' cases were similar and hence could be treated as a consolidated application.
"Some of these are individual farmers, some are farming as companies, and others have Bilateral Partnership Agreements and so on. So obviously all these peculiarities preclude any suggestion of homogeneity in the matter at hand. They are all different," the official said.
Deputy AG (Criminal Division) Mr Johannes Tomana said the tribunal's judgment would not affect ongoing court proceedings in Zimbabwe against white farmers who were resisting land reform.
"We will continue to prosecute them under Section 3 of the Gazetted Lands (Consequential Provisions) Act. The judgment in Windhoek does not affect our domestic criminal proceedings against them," Mr Tomana said.
However, Government insiders suspect there was "political gerrymandering" in the court proceedings and found it odd that the judgment was delivered on the eve of Zimbabwe's elections.
"If you look at the MDC-T's flip-flops on the land issue just before the elections, you tend to think that they knew what the tribunal's judgment would be. Our reading of the matter is that (Morgan) Tsvangirai was going to use the judgment as an excuse to reverse land reforms had he won the presidential elections.
"The judgment would have given an MDC government the leeway to claim that Sadc was opposed to Zimbabwe's Land Reform Programme and hence the mandate to reverse the process. This ties in with the way white ex-farmers went around the country threatening resettled black farmers soon after the polls," a Government official said yesterday. He added that the Law Society of Zimbabwe had also got in on the act and "encouraged" local law firms to pursue similar court proceedings with the Sadc Tribunal in a bid to reverse land reforms.
On 21 April, LSZ executive secretary Mr Steven Murambasvina wrote a letter to the managing partners of all law firms in Zimbabwe (reference number SM/jp/Sadc Tribunal) in which he expressed joy at the judgment and suggested that it be used as a basis to challenge the Land Reform Programme.
"I have the pleasure of attaching herewith a judgment which was handed down by the Sadc Tribunal on a case between Zimbabwean farmers and the Zimbabwean Government. I hope it would serve as a precedent in cases were (sic) remedies do not fully guarantee our clients' rights," he wrote.
Zimbabwe embarked on its fast-track Land Reform Programme in 2000 after the State found the willing-buyer/willing-seller system was not empowering the black majority at a reasonable pace.
As a result, land previously in the hands of some 4 000 white farmers has been distributed to over 300 000 black families across the country in the commercial and subsistence farming sectors.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Herald. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
