Source: Harare’s house demolitions expose a failed, corrupt land reform that enriched only a small elite
Where corruption reigns, the people suffer.
As municipal bulldozers roll through St. Martins in Harare, reducing homes to piles of rubble, the immediate human cost is as heartbreaking as it is devastating.
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Families stand helpless in the dust, watching their life savings turned to debris in a matter of minutes.
While authorities routinely hide behind claims of enforcing city planning laws and clearing illegal structures, the destruction in St. Martins is not an isolated event.
It is part of a broader, recurring pattern across the capital—from recent past demolitions in areas like Budiriro, Ridgeview, and Belvedere to the ongoing destruction today.
These crushings do not merely point to a severe urban housing shortage or the predatory greed of politically connected land barons; they expose the fundamental failure and systemic corruption of Zimbabwe’s entire land reform program.
When land reform was launched—albeit chaotically and violently—its declared mandate was to address colonial land injustices and restore dignity to the indigenous majority by giving them land.
Yet today, forty-six years after independence, the tragic reality is that the vast majority of Zimbabweans do not own a single piece of land, even just a few square meters to call their own.
What we witnessed instead, since independence in 1980, were consecutive land redistribution drives that were thoroughly corrupted.
Rather than benefiting the landless masses, most of the country’s prime land ended up in the hands of top ZANU-PF officials, senior government figures, and the military top brass.
This blatant diversion of national resources was the primary reason the British government under Tony Blair decided to pull out of financing Zimbabwe’s land program—funding originally agreed upon at the 1979 Lancaster House Conference.
London cited the widespread misuse of millions of pounds by the Harare administration, highlighting that land meant to uplift poor, landless citizens was systematically handed to a small ruling elite.
Decades later, the statistics confirm this betrayal.
Analysis of household data shows that approximately only 5% to 7% of Zimbabwe’s population directly received land allocations under these schemes.
Furthermore, a disproportionate amount of highly lucrative, highly productive commercial farms under the A2 scheme went directly to political heavyweights rather than ordinary citizens.
Consequently, forty-six years after independence, millions of Zimbabweans remain entirely landless in both rural and urban areas.
In rural communities, citizens live under customary tenure where, under Zimbabwean law, they cannot obtain title deeds, leaving them with zero security of tenure and perpetually at the mercy of the state.
Those in urban centers face an even more desperate plight.
They are forced to purchase land even for a basic human necessity like shelter—yet urban land is in critical short supply because most of it remains locked in private, municipal, or state hands.
Had the land reform program been genuine and people-centered, surely in a country covering approximately 390,757 square kilometers—roughly the size of the US state of Montana, or about three times the size of England—ordinary Zimbabweans could easily have been allocated modest residential plots.
Instead, a privileged elite owns multiple urban properties while simultaneously holding vast, contiguous tracts of prime agricultural land.
Official audits and investigative disclosures revealed that the former first family accumulated multiple properties totaling well over 16,000 hectares across at least 14 to 16 individual farms.
Single holdings like Gushungo Estates in Mazowe alone measured over 4,046 hectares, flanked by neighboring properties ranging from 800 to 1,400 hectares each.
Land audits further noted that high-ranking military commanders, cabinet ministers, and party officials secured former commercial estates averaging between 1,000 and 2,500 hectares per holding.
This occurred despite statutory regulations like Statutory Instrument 41 of 2020, which capped maximum farm sizes from 250 hectares in prime rainfall zones up to 2,000 hectares in dry pastoral regions.
Meanwhile, ordinary Zimbabweans in urban areas cannot secure a measly 400 square meters to build a family home.
Denied access through legitimate channels, they are left completely vulnerable to corrupt, ruling-party-linked land barons who sell them unserviced, unauthorized plots.
The inevitable result is the devastating scene currently unfolding in St. Martins.
The rubble in St. Martins is a tragic monument to a grand promise betrayed by a land reform program that stripped land from the colonial past only to concentrate it in the hands of a new elite.
It leaves ordinary citizens homeless in their own country.
Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com
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