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Bishops reject land-reform scheme
Plans overcome by fraud
Zimbabwe’s bishops have criticized the African country’s government and its controversial land reform scheme, while also defending the embattled judiciary.
According to a BBC report, the bishops said that people live in fear of violence and that the rule of law has been suspended. A restoration of confidence in the regime can come about only when the courts operate efficiently and independently, they said.
The bishops also charged that the land-reform scheme put forward by the government had been badly tainted by force and fraud. In practice, they observed, the program has confiscated property from landowners (most of them white) and handed it over not to their (mostly black) tenants but to political cronies and friends of the regime. The bishops said the program is inflicting misery on farm laborers, who are being put out of work as arable lands are taken out of agricultural production by the new owners, many of whom evidently have no intention of making their properties productive.