Photo credit: Linda Mujuru, GPJ Zimbabwe
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 levelled 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.
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.
“People have
got that hope, and they will keep on voting.”Reuben AkiliCombined Harare
Residents Association
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.
Children walk
home after school in Mugarisanwa, an informal neighbourhood in Harare. Roughly
one-third of Harare’s residents now live in informal settlements, many of which
lack basic services.
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.
Plus, says
Stanley Gama, the council’s corporate communications manager, the city has run
out of land to sell.
Many homes in
Harare are built on land distributed along political lines. Critics say the
ruling party, ZANU-PF, uses land allocation to reward loyalty, contributing to
the city’s growing informal settlements.
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.”
A house stands
on land in Harare that is not serviced by infrastructure of any kind.
This story was originally published by Global Press Journal.
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