The Sunday Mail
Tonderai SJ Makoni
The ruthless colonial Rhodesians were said to be highly successful farmers.
This is because they went into farming supported by the Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of the 1930s.
The piece of legislation acted as an economic, political and racist tool to maximise their returns in the colony.
Under the LAA, the most conductive fertile farming land belonged to the whites while the least fertile was apportioned to the inferior race, the natives.
Land for natives was solely for subsistence purposes. It was the objective of the white colonial farmers to maximise their racial, economic, political, social and technological supremacy interests. Farming became a commercial enterprise that was a preserve for the whites. The colonialist Government as well as agricultural and commercial banks gave full backing to the colonial agriculturalists’ advocacy organisation, the Rhodesian Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU).
These farmers had monopoly over the production of agrarian products, rearing commercial livestock for beef and milk, growing tobacco, maize, wheat, soya beans, citrus fruits, apples, grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, just to mention but a few. Because of the 2000 execution of the Land Reform Programme (LRP), white former farmers left the country en masse.
Since they had controlled commercial agriculture, production dropped to worrying levels. Significant reduction was noted in tobacco, seed maize, wheat, potatoes and horticulture production.
It was worsened by droughts, shortages of fertilisers and agricultural chemicals. This was because whites stopped farming and closed shops, manufacturing and mining businesses.
There was consequently massive unemployment. Beef, milk, piggery, chicken, ostriches and crocodile production fell drastically. Seed maize availability to indigenous farmers, who had grown to depend totally on purchasing from such shops, were unable to engage in farming. It baffles the mind why local farmers forgot their yesteryear farming practices to boost production. While living in Mashonaland East’s Melfort area between 2008 and 2016, I noticed land lying fallow because farmers said they did not have seed maize. This surprised me because those of us who grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s witnessed the selection of healthy maize cobs by our parents after harvest for sowing the following season. Such a tradition appears to have been abandoned after independence in 1980. The sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe for embarking on the land reform programme brought about drastic fall in maize production which was accompanied by shortages of mealie-meal country wide.
For the land reform programme to have been efficient and effective, there was need for experts in agriculture and propagation of better methods of farming.
Despite the virtues of the land reform programme, its worst, if not its major weakness seems to have been the failure by Government to create a program and mechanism to increase systematically, crop and livestock production and improve output quality.
The land redistribution programme should have been followed up by the creation of the Land Production and Productivity Programme (LPPP). The formation of the LPPP would have been informative, educative, develop good work habits, impart skills and mobilise the population in the art and practice of making land use more productive by adopting means of learning by practical participation. Theoretically, action learning, which I shall illustrate with what happened at St Faith in Makoni District from the 1950s to 1970s, was needed. Agricultural institutions namely: Land Commission, Forestry Commission, Zimbabwe Agricultural Society, Zunderamambo, Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union, Zimbabwe Indigenous Commercial Farmers Union, Commercial Farmers Union plus Agricultural Research Institutions, Colleges and University Faculties of Agriculture had to live to their mandate in accelerating growth of the national economy.
At grassroots level, action learning meant imparting best farming practices via mass mobilisation of the youth, village heads, headmen, chiefs, informed and able individuals or groups with necessary expertise, at effecting objectives as obtains in some Zanu-PF structures as existing in Muzarabani, for example. Greater productivity is availed by knowledge of crops, livestock production that flourish best in each region and what needs to be done. General agricultural grains in the country are inclusive of maize, rapoko, sorghum, wheat, mhunga, mapfunde, mupunga and root crops which are groundnuts, sweet potatoes, potatoes, cassava with soya beans, pumpkins, pumpkin leaves, watermelons, soya beans, beans and a host of other worthy vegetables and products.
Dominant commercial agricultural products include tobacco, cotton, tea, coffee, potatoes, beans, groundnuts, soya beans, apples, pears, peaches, citrus fruits plus different types of tree nuts and plantations of usable trees. There is room for cultivation of zumbani, moringa, makoni tea through the introduction of new useful food plants, commercial or otherwise.
I have no doubt that spreading of indicated approaches, hardworking and duty conscious bodies would lead to broader and deeper agricultural revolution, whose effectiveness rubs onto the whole industrial sector. Existence of effective and efficient industrial sectors in the country will be realised through national ability to raise agricultural production through capacity to make by ourselves and for export, capital goods that fabricate capital goods which manufacture agriculture equipment and chemicals plus consumer good, cum services.
The outcome is highly possible if we develop a national strategy to educate engineering students solid engineering theories accompanied with three to five years of practical experiences in engineering fields.
Such technological indigenisation objective needs reinforcement from the government, and negotiations with engineering capital goods producing companies to offer practical experience in their corporations to our inexperienced graduate and new graduating engineers.
Ability to increase agricultural production does not rely solely on literacy although it does help. Rise in production and productivity particularly in agriculture, results from practical field experience as obtained during the 1950s St Faith Mission Farm in Makoni District. The priest in charge at that time was Father Donald Stowell and his wife Ruth, sadly both are now deceased. They persuaded Guy Clutton-Brock in the UK to come to St Faith to assist them in improving living conditions and agriculture there in accordance to the best Christian practices, as the mission had a big farming area. Clutton-Brock started a program of getting farm workers to improve production and living conditions as requested by Father Stowell through learning by doing, discussions and the importance of balanced diets. He and his wife Molly, now both deceased, used to eat with the local people among whom they lived. They dressed simple as the locals, but they were not quite at peace with the race discriminating settlers colonial establishment.
The techniques he taught of learning by doing were applied on the family allocated ten acres of land and ten herd of cattle as per need. Their harvest increased substantially through this exercise while Molly who was a trained nurse, went on to establish a physical health centre to improve the health of children at the mission where she also housed disabled children.
The net effect of the Clutton-Brock’s action learning led to some of the farm workers being given access to small farms ranging from thirty to four hundred acres, depending on land quality. This followed the anti-African antics of a Father Lewis who was hostile to what Clutton-brock and Stowell were doing.
Father Lewis was a quarter Church of England Missionary involved in the Rhodesian settlers’ racism. He destroyed the Father Stowell and Clutton-Brock running of the mission and the mission farm. He made sure life at St Faith would be as racist as it was in First Street, Salisbury, Rhodesia. I was made to understand that the hardly literate St Faith’s mission people who obtained small farms of their own, had a reputation as the best small scale farmers in the 1960s and 70s Rhodesia. Their success is indicative of the efficacy of learning by doing in the Zimbabwean Agrarian context. Therefore, the spreading of such an approach through: entities mentioned and Zunderamambo , one village or village clusters appear to me, to be some of the best mechanisms for the massive spreading of better techniques of farming to raise outputs in variety quantity and quality.
This exercise is about how agricultural productivity in Zimbabwe under endless Western economic sanctions, deteriorated but can be revived through action learning as that of 1950 at St Faith Mission Farm as they realised dramatic increase in outputs and productivity. It is possible through practicality, monitoring and determination to boost and improve the agricultural sector. Impact of proposed LPPCs mechanisms to augment production and productivity would have had to have been most robust: by our ability to manufacture for ourselves agricultural equipment cum components, by knowledge of what crops, livestock; grew best in which particular areas and localities. In addition, the encouragement of people to rear aquatic and wildlife where possible, wild fruit, trees, shrubs and fowls usable in the homesteads, at the same time introducing new crops either commercial or subsistence. Agriculture activities in this presentation, are more certain to result in increase in; production and productivity income per capita, employment plus the general living standard given the intelligence and hardworking nature of Zimbabweans. It will therefore not be out of question for the 2018 Zanu-PF General election manifesto, to propagate also the setting up of LPPCs aided by specified entities, to bring out the true transformation of agriculture, in a most beneficial fashion particularly to its liberation rural base and whole nation.
Tonderai SJ Makoni is an economist (universities of Zimbabwe, Cambridge and York). He is the first Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe black banking office manager in independent Zimbabwe and wrote this article for The Sunday Mail
