Harare
Zimbabwe
has offered to give back land to former white farmers whose properties
were seized during
the controversial land reforms two decades ago.
A
month ago the government signed a US$3.5 billion compensation agreement
with the white farmers for the land lost 20 years ago to sometimes
violent land grabs.
Then president Robert Mugabe forcibly took more than 4,000 farms from the country's 4,500 white large-scale commercial farmers
On
Monday the government said Zimbabwean or foreign citizens who lost
their farms can apply "for restoration of title to the piece of
agricultural land that was compulsorily acquired from them for
resettlement".
The offer was announced in a
statement issued jointly by Finance minister Mthuli Ncube and his
counterpart in the lands ministry, Anxious Masuka.
"Government will grant their application where
circumstances presently obtaining on the ground permit the restoration
of their land to them".
To allow the former
owners "to regain possession" of land, the ministers said, government
will revoke offers made to black farmers currently occupying the farms
and "offer them alternative land elsewhere".
The
government said "where a former farm owner regains possession of the
land that was previously acquired from them or accepts a government
offer of land restitution, this shall be the full and final settlement".
Zimbabwe
launched land reforms in 2000 seizing land from white commercial
farmers in what Mugabe said was a reversal of historical land ownership
imbalances which favoured the minority whites.
Both
Mugabe, who died in September last year, and his successor Emmerson
Mnangagwa who came to power at the back of a military coup vowed never
to reverse the land reforms.
Zimbabwe is buffeted by its worst economic crisis in over a decade, including scarcity of basics such as cornmeal.
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