Harare, Zimbabwe — ZANU-PF's practice of giving land to supporters has resulted in haphazard development, including houses in the middle of roads. But the strategy wins elections.
A political party card, not cash, got Alice Nasiyaya her first plot of land. In 2014, her brother-in-law tipped her off about a group that was distributing residential land in Harare, but their methods weren't by the book. All Nasiyaya had to do was prove she was a member of ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe's ruling party. She showed her membership card, got the land and built a house.
She claims that the people who originally allocated her land presented themselves as local ZANU-PF representatives, and she believed them. But that land, she learned later, was reserved by the city of Harare to be used for an airport expansion. And three years later, Harare City Council bulldozers came and leveled the house.
The ZANU-PF representatives went around on the day of demolition, collecting information about everyone who stayed in the area, and promising to relocate them to another place that was set aside for party loyalists like them. A year after, she says, those same ZANU-PF representatives found her another piece of land.
There, she built another house, where she still lives. Many others in her neighborhood have acquired land this way, she says.
In Zimbabwe, the ruling party has long used land promises as a tool for securing votes, creating a patronage system that trades land for political loyalty. While not new, the trend has become so widespread in informal neighborhoods like the one Nasiyaya lives in that it has spawned its own vocabulary: "emusangano," a Shona word meaning "land from the party."
But there's a flip side to these land giveaways: None of the people given properties have titles to the land where they've made their homes. The state has mastered the art of keeping people stuck, dangling the promise of title deeds every election year without delivering, says Reuben Akili, director of Combined Harare Residents Association.
"People have got that hope, and they will keep on voting," Akili says. Locals know that disloyalty could cost them the land. They could easily be kicked out, he says.
Land reforms to land giveaways
This patronage network is a spillover from past land policies. Former President Robert Mugabe issued sweeping and controversial land reforms in 2000, converting 6,000 large, white-owned farms into close to 170,000 black-owned farms, according to Human Rights Watch. But this was more than just land reform: Local people call this period the Third Chimurenga, or the third liberation struggle against colonial rule.
Much of the valuable peri-urban land on Harare's outskirts became state land, which ZANU-PF used as a political tool to gift well-connected party members, according to a national audit from 2003.
Part of the strategy was to build ZANU-PF voting blocs in the urban areas, where it was losing support. Instead of democratizing ownership of farmland and boosting crop production, the land reform became a vehicle for speculators to buy up cheap, newly available state land and resell it at a premium without accounting for the proceeds. At the same time, the Ministry of Local Government allocated some of that land to housing cooperatives, trusts and self-proclaimed "authorities" of state land, all on the basis of their connections to the ruling ZANU-PF party.
Since then, the process of land allocation has remained disorganized and unregulated.
Party officials deny illegally allocating land to supporters. Farai Muroiwa Marapira, director for information and publicity for ZANU-PF, calls the accusations false and unfounded.
"The president has been clear that he is a president for all Zimbabweans. Therefore, if land is to be distributed, it is done on non-partisan lines," he says.
Harare's city council -- which monitors land allocation and housing in the city -- has tried to intervene. Authorities in November 2024 vowed to demolish more than 5,000 homes, some of them built on land allocated to people based on their political affiliation. But this is not the first crackdown, and previous crackdowns haven't stopped the spread.
Informal settlements growing rapidly
This land allocation exacerbates the challenge of regulating infrastructure in informally-created neighborhoods. Homes are erected so haphazardly that some are built in the middle of roads, or directly on the banks of the Hunyani River.
About a third of Harare's residents live in informal settlements, according to a 2024 report by African Cities Research Consortium.
The process of buying state-owned land technically falls under the jurisdiction of local government councils. The government can give land to local authorities, who are authorized to sell it. But going through that formal channel is an onerous, slow and prohibitively expensive process. Some people have been on the waitlist to buy land through the local council for years or even decades.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Plus, says Stanley Gama, the council's corporate communications manager, the city has run out of land to sell.
Even in cases when ZANU-PF land barons ask for money for land, it's cheaper than going through formal channels, says Nigel, who requested that just his middle name be used, for fear of retaliation. He has three pieces of land, which he says he bought cheaply because of his affiliation to the ruling party -- but he doesn't have titles to any of them. He says he paid under US$1,000 for what would typically cost between US$6,000 and US$9,000. Even if he loses the land, he says, he's saved money on what he would otherwise have paid in rent.
"If you attend youth meetings, you get the land free; but if you don't attend often, that's when you pay a small fee," he says.
Marapira, the ZANU-PF official, says the police can arrest people who sell land this way.
This will not work, says Akili, the Combined Harare Residents Association director.
"It is very rare to see them getting arrested, prosecuted and jailed," he says. "They are always linked to powerful people."
Linda Mujuru is a Global Press Journal reporter-in-residence based in Harare, Zimbabwe.
