April 28, 2000
Desmond Davies
PANA Correspondent
LONDON, UK (PANA) - The British government has "reluctantly" accepted that it has a responsibility to contribute to Zimbabwe's land reform programme, the Zimbabwean local government and national housing minister, John Nkomo, said Friday.
Britain had also agreed that it was bound by the conclusions of a 1998 donors' conference on farm resettlement, he added.
Nkomo was speaking at the Zimbabwean High Commission in London as leader of his country's delegation that held talks with the British government on land reform in Zimbabwe.
Both sides met for eight hours Thursday in a bid to resolve the land issue, which has escalated into the occupation by war veterans of land owned by white farmers.
Nkomo said that the delegation came to London after British Foreign Minister Robin Cook offered an invitation to President Robert Mugabe, at the recent Africa-Europe summit in Cairo, to send a team to discuss land reform.
He said this had been a positive move on the part of the Labour Party government, which had been very reluctant to abide by the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, which led to Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.
The Labour government's reluctance was founded on the fact that a Conservative government signed the agreement, he added.
"What we are saying is that the Lancaster House Agreement is binding on any British government," Nkomo said.
During the meeting with British officials, he stressed that the root cause of the current impasse on land reform was the failure of donors to fully finance the programme that was agreed in 1998.
"There has been no donor support for land acquisition and infrastructure on resettlement schemes and no progress made by non-state actors to deliver land in support of resettlement through the so-called complimentary approaches," he said.
"Nonetheless, my government is hopeful that the current negotiations between itself and other stakeholders will result in greater support to the land resettlement component of the land reform programme," Nkomo added.
Cook told the Zimbabwean delegation that there was 36 million pounds sterling for land reform.
"But it must be land reform on the basis on the principles that we and the government of Zimbabwe agreed to in 1998," he said.
Cook added that this would be "on the basis of a fair price to farmers", transparency "and should benefit the rural poor who have no land."
Nkomo later told journalists that it was wrong for the British to complain that land already allocated had gone to civil servants and government ministers, saying that only one minister had benefited from this.
"Less than 10 percent of the land has gone to civil servants or ministers," he said.
He pointed out that the current white owners of farms were actually former Rhodesian government ministers, civil servants, senior army officers, and ex-members of the police force.
"All we are saying is for the British to live up to their responsibilities," Nkomo said.