Mutumwa Mawere

We all want to be rich and free.
Human civilization has never prepared us to understand the complexity of life and what one needs to do to escape from poverty.

What is poverty? Poverty can be described as the condition of not having the means to afford basic human needs such as health care, nutrition, clean water, clothing and shelter. One can also talk of relative poverty which refers to the condition of having fewer resources or less income than others within a society or country or compared to worldwide averages.

Why are the majority of Africans poor? This is complex question that requires critical thinking.
For people who focus on the past, it is easy to blame colonialism and imperialism as the root cause of poverty in Africa.

In making the argument that poverty in Africa is a historically determined condition one also has to critically examine what would have happened had colonialism not visited the continent.

One can legitimately argue that access to land is a necessary but not sufficient condition to reduce the frontiers of poverty.

Africa is well endowed with land. The post-colonial experience so far has not been encouraging in terms of leveraging the land resources for agricultural production.

There are many African states with vast tracts of land that are not used to produce food. As a consequence, agri-tourism is taking root where foreign nationals who can better utilise land in Africa are acquiring such land for export production.

Subsistence agriculture is what drives African land use.
Commercial agriculture requires an institutional, financial and human capital framework that is not part of the native African heritage.

It is typical that Africans work only 4 months in a year and spent the rest of the year consuming what they would have produced.

Rain plays an important part in determining the viability of subsistence agriculture. Water harvesting strategies need capital investment and any investment would require returns.

The Zimbabwean experience is instructive. Here you have a nation state that gained independence in 1980 after 90 years of white settler political hegemony.

The white settler political hegemony started as a commercial project by Cecil John Rhodes, a proud Englishman, who believed in the superiority of English civilization.

Through Rudd, in 1888, mineral rights were secured and this was followed by the transfer of the rights to a public company, British South Africa Company (BSAC) that was supported by a private security company, British South Africa Police (BSAP).

This private initiative succeeded in converting Zimbabwe into a colonial state that was governed by a private institution.

The experiment worked for the settlers who did not see any contradiction between the colonial project and black civil and economic rights.

At the time, it was argued that there was no serious commercial mining and agricultural activities that were interrupted as a consequence of Rhodes' initiative.
Natives simply could co-exist with the new dispensation.

However, the new dispensation required cheap labour and, therefore, a system was designed to convert by force native Africans into a new class of labourers.
The colonial project required a holistic approach to it. It had to be underpinned by a sustainable business and political model.

At the outset, the farmers who came to settle organised themselves into co-operatives that were established to provide support to the farmers.

The role of the state was to promote and protect the project through a supportive legal and institutional framework.

One can argue that the land apportionment arrangement guaranteed white settler success in agriculture.

If this was the case, then it should be self evident that in areas where natives have got complete control of land, success in agriculture should be guaranteed. However, this is not the case.

In the case of Zimbabwe, when the land reform program started, an estimated 4,500 commercial farmers were in existence.

Since independence, black dominance in the production of maize and cotton confused many to conclude that land reform could produce outcomes superior to the one possible in which commercial and subsistence agriculture co-existed with each other.

Commercial agriculture did co-exist with a vibrant subsistence sector since independence until the land reform gathered steam.

Commercial agriculture played its role in the broader national arena where export revenues were generated from farm output.

The role and vitality of commercial agriculture to the viability of the state was not readily understood by the practitioners of the program.

A view was held that the success scored by peasants could be repeated in commercial farms forgetting that commercial agriculture is no different from a manufacturing enterprise that has to operate 7/24.

The disturbance of 4,500 agricultural decision makers in Zimbabwe contributed to a significant contraction in national output.

What is ironic is that some of the displaced farmers relocated to neighbouring states and have managed to demonstrate that their success in Zimbabwe was not necessarily due to their race alone.

What can Africa learn from the Zimbabwean experience? An argument has been made that Zimbabwe will never be a colony again suggesting that even after independence it remained a colony.

Is it the case that Zimbabwe was ever a colony? The land mass of Zimbabwe did not change because of colonization. It remained where it was always.

What merely happened is that people who were not born in Zimbabwe and who did not look like natives adopted Zimbabwe as a home.

They had no guarantees from the mother country and more importantly they did not expect any handouts. They simply had to make their project work for them.

This required that they look at farm methods as well as the kind of business model required to produce the desired outcomes.

We all know that regrettably racism was part and parcel of the project and its justification was that natives could not be incorporated into the model because their values, beliefs and principles were foreign to imported ones.

We have seen what impact the displacement of 4,500 farmers has had on the Zimbabwean economy and more importantly on the future of 13 million people.

If the 4,500 farmers had adopted subsistence farming methods, there is no doubt that the urgency of the land reform program would not have taken the form and pace that it has.

The feeling among policy makers was that if 4,500 farmers can underpin the viability of the state then democratising access to land would achieve better results.

This has not happened. Some have sought to place the blame on sanctions. Instead of frontiers of poverty diminishing we have seen more Zimbabweans in absolute poverty as a consequence of the land reform program to compel us to pause and reflect on what needs to happen in Africa to reduce poverty.

Does Africa need commercial agriculture? Definitely! If this is the case, critical thinking needs to be applied in the quest of poverty alleviation.

We have to learn from our experiences. Zambia, Nigeria, Mozambique and other countries that have attracted former Zimbabwean farmers have registered positive growth in farm output while Zimbabwe continues to associate continued poverty and lack of significant supply response from the farm sector on targeted sanctions.

Rhodes was clear on what was required to make his experiment work. He knew that success of the project would ultimately depend on the creativity and entrepreneurship of the settlers who were surrounded by a foreign culture.

It is often easy to advance an argument that indigenisation is a real and effective remedy to poverty forgetting that business success is a product not just of asset ownership but other myriad of factors that have to be put in place before the future of Africa can be secure for its people.