by Philip Rankin had long hoped for compensation when his family’s farm in Zimbabwe was seized because he was white, but cancer took him first.
The 65-year-old farmer died in early December, almost seven years after he was handcuffed and forcibly removed from his farm by truckloads of police from Robert Mugabe’s government.
Like many of the thousands of white Zimbabwean farmers who have faced the same fate since Mugabe’s invasions and farm takeovers began in early 2000, he found life difficult without the land his family farmed for more more than 30 years.
Mr Rankin found work for a few years but then developed cancer. His widow, Anita, said: “I was hoping he would be well enough to take us outside to see the sun again. But that didn’t happen.”
She said it was now unclear how she would pay for his medical expenses. “We have valued our farm and were expecting compensation but we will think about this after his funeral,” she said.
Many other old white farmers who lost their land are now at risk, relying on charity to survive. Although the Zimbabwean government has agreed on paper to compensate them for their loss, they fear that their chances of getting money are dwindling because the debt-ridden country has no money.
Supporters of Mugabe’s Zanu PF party began a farm invasion in early 2000 and eventually took over 4,000 farms.
Mugabe promised independence that he would let white farmers keep their land. But his “cultivation” began after a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, emerged in the late 1990s and put him under enormous pressure.
Many in the farming sector supported the new party financially and it provided a serious challenge to Zanu PF in the 2000 general election.
Mugabe needed a sop to keep his more militant supporters on his side, and he began to turn a blind eye to those who wanted to seize white ground. Senior Zanu PF members built many invaded farms, and Mugabe’s wife, Grace, helped herself to at least 20.
Many successful black farmers who bought their properties after independence in 1980 were also evicted from their land. At least 10 white farmers were killed and thousands of farm workers lost their jobs.
Zimbabwe’s small but stable economy was destroyed, as was the country’s political and financial reputation.
Then, in 2020, after years of negotiations between several farmers’ organizations, including the Union of Commercial Farmers (CFU), the Valuation Consortium, which carried out a valuation of assets on seized farms, and the government signed an agreement known as the Deed of Global Compensation.
Seizure and separation
The Zimbabwean government was paying for the land, claiming it was stolen from Africans, but agreed to pay farmers for the “improvements” they had made, such as roads, buildings, dams and irrigation systems.
The deed committed the government to pay $3.5 billion over five years to dispossessed farmers for these improvements. The farmers, said the agreement, would be paid in US dollars anywhere in the world.
From the beginning, there was suspicion and division among the dispossessed farmers. Few farmers were able to see, let alone examine, the compensation agreement before it was signed.
A group of senior farmers were suspicious of the government’s heated agreement and sought legal advice from a senior advocate.
Daniel Tivadar, who is bar-registered in the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe, provided a detailed legal report which described the deal as highly unusual and said any compensation arrangement would need to be submitted to Parliament.
He also noted that the Valuation Consortium would receive almost £100 million from the deal.
“It was a sloppy, amateurish deal so we didn’t trust it,” said an elderly farmer who spoke from Harare this week but declined to be identified.
However other farmers, especially those suffering from a lack of money since having to give up their farms, celebrated the compensation deal. Long-serving CFU chief executive Ben Purcell-Gilpin was not one of them and was so upset by the deal that he resigned.
The CFU, which had been the main organization for generations of farmers, lost even more members.
‘We will get nothing’
Andrew Pascoe, its current president, who still farms and has expanded his operations in recent years, did not respond to requests for comment.
In the intervening three years, the government has shown no sign of honoring the agreement it signed. A number of farmers and other interested parties have drawn up a new agreement, behind the scenes, details of which emerged earlier this month.
This new “agreement” says payment for “improvements” would be government bonds over 10 years at 1 percent interest, which financial experts say would be less than 10 percent of the value of the 2020 agreement.
“We will not accept that deal,” said a prominent Zimbabwean farmer who asked not to be named. “We know the government can’t or won’t pay us. We won’t get anything so we have to look for other ways to survive.”
Angus Selby, one of the young farmers who were evicted from their land in 2002 and now lives and works in the UK and the US, said: “The government agreed to pay the farmers $3.5 billion over five years in hard cash , but having failed three times now.”
He said this was partly because the government could not afford the deal and failed to raise an international bond, and “partly because the poor drafting of the agreement did not include adequate protection for the farmers”.
“Fast forward three years and there is a very bad government bond deal being attempted over a 10 year period with only a desperate minority of farmers willing to accept it,” he said.
“Any hope for a fair market must be part of the wider rehabilitation of agriculture and the restoration of property rights and must be supported and shared with the international community.”
He added that many had forgotten that white people in Zimbabwe are still prohibited by the constitution from owning farmland.
Tony Hawkins, a veteran economist in the country, said: “The IMF has described Zimbabwe as a ‘debt crunch’ since the early 2000s.
Compensation is a low priority
“In theory it would be possible to pay $3.5 billion from exports and especially from a diaspora inflow of over $1 billion per year, but the reality is that farm compensation is low in the order of priorities.”
He said the only reason for the compensation deal is that donors and lenders have said that without compensation it would be almost impossible to attract new capital, except from countries like China, Iran and the UAE.
The only farmers who received compensation since the land was acquired were about 350 who negotiated privately with the government. Most did not disclose what they were paid or how they got paid.
The government also owes compensation to the scores of farmers evicted from several foreign countries with which it had trade and investment agreements.
In recent years, the Dutch administration sent money to the Zimbabwean government to pay for its nationals whose farms had been taken by Mugabe’s colleagues and supporters. To date, Zimbabwe has not repaid that loan.
A recent report by local land experts shows that many “new farmers” want title deeds for the land they are now occupying so that it has a value that they could use to get loans from commercial banks or even sell the land sell.
Farmers whose land was taken after 2000 still have their original title deeds and are awaiting compensation, so the ownership of land seized after 2000 is still disputed and complicated but in fact the state controls that land.
Mr Rankin’s farm was adopted by Sylvester Nyatsuro, a trained medical doctor born in Zimbabwe who emigrated to the UK and retired from Britain.
At the time, Dr Nyatsuro denied knowledge of the violence used to enforce his claim to the farm, and said the state had allocated the property to him according to normal legal procedure.
Dr Nyatsuro had no experience in farming and his tobacco crop failed. He returned to the UK after five years. Mr Rankin’s land is now fallow.
