Multiple farm owners risk jail
2005-09-12 12:57
Special Report
Four Chinese men face deportation from Zimbabwe after they were arrested for killing more than 40 tortoises for meat, a report says.
A dusty road leads to the village of Wedza, where veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war eke out a meagre living on their farm cooperative, which after a promising start now brings only despair.
Johannesburg - Zimbabwe has threatened people who clandestinely acquired more than one farm under the land reform programme with jail, the country's Herald Online reported on Monday.
It quoted lands minister Didymus Mutasa, as saying: "We want to end corruption in the allocation of farms and those who would be found with many farms risk being jailed."
The minister was speaking in Masvingo after appointing new members of provincial and district land committees.
"How can a single person own more than one farm? These are chiefs (senior political and government officials) with many farms and we want to end that corruption so that everyone gets land."
The government wanted to "clean up" the land reform programme and meet its goal of decongesting communal areas.
Mutasa said the appointment of provincial district land committees was part of a drive to step up land redistribution before the rainy season.
Stressing that the land reform programme was not driven by racial prejudice, he said it was aimed at rectifying a skewed land ownership system which served the minority whites.
Like any other Zimbabwean, whites - if they wished to be on land - also had to wait their turn to be resettled, Mutasa said.
- SAPA