The Sunday Mail
GOVERNMENT sets the ball rolling this week on the long-awaited land audit which will start in Mashonaland East province as soon as the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement unveils a budget estimated at US$35 million for the extensive programme.
Land and Rural Resettlement Minister Dr Douglas Mombeshora said his office was finalising the budget for the land audit which is likely to be completed within a year.
The land audit is expected to rattle political heavyweights who own more than one farm. Some of such culprits include former Presidential Affairs Minister Didymus Mutasa, whose farm grab shenanigans have since been exposed in Manicaland.
Former Zanu-PF Mashonaland East chairman Ray Kaukonde has also been accused of multiple farm ownership and using his political clout to protect white commercial farmers.
Dr Mombeshora said: “We will begin work in Mashonaland East province because, as you may know, there has been a lot of concern about reported land ownership anomalies in that province. After we have agreed on the budget we will move onto the ground without delay. Ideally we want it done within a year. We are putting in place mechanisms that will ensure that we are the programme’s major financiers.
“That is why this week I will be presenting in Cabinet a paper finalising the issue of land taxes where I will propose that my ministry retain a small percentage of the revenue collected and use it to finance the audit exercise.”
President Mugabe has since revealed that around 163 farms in Mashonaland East remained in the hands of white farmers under unclear circumstances, amid suspicions that they were protected by Mr Kaukonde.
Dr Mombeshora has also exposed irregularities in allocation of farms with some children as young as 10 years old receiving farms or plots.
He said some beneficiaries were allocated more farms because of a mix-up of names.
External auditors, Government said, will be hired to carry out the audit to thwart possible conflict of interest.
The audit feeds into plans by the ministry, working in collaboration with the Office of the President and Cabinet, to establish a centralised farm registry system linking the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to its provincial offices handling land allocations.
Apart from exposing greedy multiple farm owners, the land audit is also expected to flush out unproductive farmers whose land has long been lying idle and ascertain the exact number of farmers who benefited from the land reform programme.
The Ministry of Lands and Resettlement does not have a database for the beneficiaries of the land reform programme. It is said about 300 000 people benefited since 2000 although no empirical evidence has been produced to back up the figures.
The new system, which is part of the Government’s E-Governance programme, will register information such as farm maps, the farm owners’ personal information details and land use among other details.
Significantly, the system will enable senior ministry officials at the national headquarters to remotely access land allocation data from provincial offices and possibly detect fraudulent activities by provincial land officers.
The computerised system will also, among other things, ensure that there are no multiple farm allocations as well as help settle farm boundary and ownership disputes.
Minster Mombeshora said the programme will be launched before mid-year. “We will be definite about the number of landless people in the country once we have compiled all the details from the provinces through the E-Governance programme.
“Through that platform we can be able to access all information about land allocations and ownership from our provincial offices directly from our offices here in Harare.
“Just this week our senior staffers where attending a training seminar where they were learning about using the new system.”
