A SELF-FULFILLED PROPHESY

A SELF-FULFILLED PROPHESY
OR
IT WASN’T TRUE UNTIL THEY MADE IT SO.

Successful farmers do not have to be white. Black farmers (not the `telephone farmers’ or the thieving politicians and their friends who only take farms for vanity or spite) are very able farmers. The proof would have been found in that brief moment after independence when the racial barriers to ownership of good land and good farming practises started to come down. The commercial farmers and the Union (GAPWUZ) of black farm workers who had become managers and foremen were producing crops, not merely for subsistence, but surplus food for the nation. All this can be traced in the statistics but that is not the point of this piece. Let me try to explain how pre-independence prejudice and doubts about the abilities of black farmers have turned into a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.
Almost overnight, after the white farmers were driven so hastily and so violently away, the infrastructure that sustained their good farming methods started to collapse. A new farmer, ANY new farmer was going to find it heavy going, once the little islands of expertise in large and small towns serving the whole range of farming needs were gone. Where was the machine shop that repaired the tractor, the plough, the harrow and the harvester, the farm `bakkie’ and even the old office typewriter? What happened to the warehouse filled with agricultural lime, fertilizer, gypsum insecticides, veterinary supplies? How can the tonnes of seed be delivered before the planting season when the warehouses are empty or the supplier has no fuel? What about keeping the country roads accessible and in good repair? Where are the transporters and their managers both private and public keeping the trucks roadworthy, the goods trains running? Who mends and keeps open the bridges, the arteries of supply? Why can’t the grain for stock feed be delivered from the fields to be milled and widely distributed? What happened to the little factories, the grinding mills that need diesel fuel? These are just a few of the `downstream’ industries that a good farmer needs. They have been trashed, overrun, put out of business, their owners made bankrupt and keen to go somewhere else where business is not so difficult to do.

For a new farmer, operating in the absence of an infrastructure that took a hundred years to bring to near-perfection is not a practical proposition. Farming in such an environment as has existed in Zimbabwe since the mad rush to drive the commercial farmers off the land is impossible.

So there is no produce, the people are starving and the people who say that blacks can’t farm are now speaking the truth. They can’t farm, and soon, neither can whites or anybody else farm successfully in Zimbabwe.

Before independence Zimbabwe had developed over many decades to become a white farmer’s paradise and it has now become anybody’s hell. Droughts cannot be overcome because lakes and dams and river water reticulation are losing their pipes to thieves or their overhead irrigation equipment to vandals. A black farmer walked in to the white farmers’ paradise, looked around and saw that everybody who was needed to sustain it, was leaving, or had already left. They did not leave willingly, there was no farming going on to sustain them. It was a two way thing.

And now the filling station owner a few miles from the farm has closed his pumps and his little workshop because there were few vehicles running and there were sometimes no vehicles because there was no fuel. Or it could have been the other way around: there was no fuel and so there are no vehicles calling by every day to keep the business alive. Whichever way you look at it, it is all quite mad.

Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Herbert Murerwa recently came up with a make-believe budget. He knows that agriculture was the bedrock of the country’s economy before his deranged boss destroyed it, but he has to pretend that there is such a thing as an economy without farmers – never mind the skin colour of the farmers. Tony Hawkins, the economist, giving his annual evaluation of the budget has no need to pretend. He has plenty of facts and statistics at his disposal. He pulls no punches: “If anyone was hoping the budget will alter the direction of the economy they are living in a fool's paradise” and “Murerwa's predictions on growth and a reduction in inflation from 411% at present to 80% by the end of next year were suspect”, he said. He was in no doubt about what happens to an economy whose foundations have been destroyed.

New, black farmers haven’t a hope of showing how good they might have been, given the supporting infrastructure that they need. It wasn’t true about black Zimbabweans being useless as farmers, until the ZANU (PF) government made it so.


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell