By Peta Thornycroft | The Mercury
In the madness of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where most people are hungry or on the point of starvation, police stopped one of the largest food producers planting his maize crop nearly two weeks ago.
By this week they had still not allowed him to resume planting the food that millions of starving Zimbabweans so desperately need.
Doug Taylor-Freeme, 43, is one of Africa’s most respected farmers who has been elected by hundreds of thousands of mostly black colleagues in southern Africa to represent them at the world’s most powerful agricultural organisations.
“This is mad,” said even a young police officer with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, who was sent to stop Taylor-Freeme from growing food – the only farmer for miles around in Zimbabwe’s richest agricultural province planting maize in time for the summer season.
The blush of green from his new maize crop spread across a searingly hot 40ha field, with irrigation splashing overhead, should produce Zimbabwe’s staple food for tens of thousands of people in less than six months.
Meanwhile the UN’s World Food Programme and partners scrabble to overcome Mugabe’s reluctance to allow them to distribute emergency food aid to five million people, or nearly half the population.
On an adjacent field, a tractor belonging to a man who claims to be a chief was tilling Taylor-Freeme’s winter wheat land where summer soya beans are due to be planted in soil with sufficient left- over fertiliser to need no further nutrients.
Before he forced his tractor on to Taylor-Freem’s land last month, Chief Nemakonde, in his late 60s, and with many wives and scores of children, set the wheat stalks alight. Now there will be no hay for the cattle.
Taylor-Freeme had to stop planting another 360ha of land which he was doing at breakneck speed to catch both the rain now starting to fall and the peak summer soil heat to ensure his yield was at least three tons per acre.
Nemakonde, who many locals say is not a genuine traditional leader but a strong supporter of Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party, has already taken over five formerly white-owned farms in the district.
They are derelict, abandoned, so now the chief wants Taylor-Freeme’s Romsey, the last of the white commercial farms in the Makonde South district, 140km north of Harare.
“On Wednesday I was told by the commanding officer for Mashonaland West, Moses Chihuri, that he would ignore the high court order I was awarded in March ordering the chief off the land,” Taylor-Freeme said.
“He told me the orders came from Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri’s office, who may be a relative.
“Some local police do not support this and so they had to send men from Harare and even they don’t like what they have to do, to stop me planting and to prevent our community coming on to chase the chief’s people away again.
“So I am going back to the high court seeking an order of contempt, but this takes time and meanwhile planting is paralysed.”
Taylor-Freeme has lost count of the number of times he has been in court since the first round of invasions began on his land eight years ago. He estimates 40 times.
Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri, who has helped himself to a couple of white-owned farms since the ethnic purge of nearly all Zimbabwe’s 4 000 white farmers began in 2000, is appointed by President Mugabe, aged 84.
“The lands department asked me to plant maize heavily this year, so I did, because there is none from last year,” said Taylor-Freeme.
Taylor-Freeme is particularly anxious because he has borrowed quintillions of Zimbabwe dollars (about R4 million) from a local bank to buy seed, fertiliser and fuel to plant 320ha of maize.
He was tipped off by community sympathisers that Zanu-PF thugs, including policemen, were on their way to seize his inputs, which are subsidised in part by the European Union’s e1.5 billion (R19.5 billion) aid to boost regional food production.
Also targeted for theft, say the locals, are 100 tons of Taylor-Freeme’s wheat harvest.
Last summer Chief Nemakonde’s extended family and other Zanu-PF sympathisers helped themselves to the small maize crop planted to feed Taylor-Freeme’s 300 workers and extended families, a total of about 1 000 people living on Romsey.
“The value of the Zimbabwe dollar means the workers don’t want money, they want food, and I cannot find maize anywhere, so they eat my wheat. God knows what anyone else is managing to find to feed people this year,” he said.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe failed to pay Taylor-Freeme about R1 million for his 2007 tobacco and wheat harvests which he was forced to sell via government agencies.
All Nemakonde’s previous crops have failed, as have those of Chief Magistrate Mongova, from the provincial capital Chinhoyi, who has also taken chunks of Taylor-Freeme’s land.
Mongova’s fields are derelict, marked by two R1.5 million centre-pivot irrigation machines, wrecked by pillage, standing rusting.
Nearby are the fields stolen by Sabine Tsakwe, the permanent secretary for agriculture, also lying fallow as she works in town and only occasionally plants a small patch of maize, now smothered by weeds, like all the others in the district.
One of Nemakonde’s wives and some adult children stand guard as they have for a year, living in squalor under a tree about 100m back from the Taylor-Freemes’ modest homestead.
Earlier this year, to harass Taylor-Freeme’s family, including his mother, Merle, 70, they beat drums day and night until the local community moved in on them and slashed the drum skins.
Taylor-Freeme has been elected vice-president of the Southern African Agricultural Unions for the third year, is a member of the board of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers and is at present vice-president of the Paris-based Grain Oil Seed Producers’ Group.
He can irrigate nearly 240ha from a 14 million megalitre dam he built over 18 months on un- stable dolomite 10 years ago.
In the mid-afternoon, backs to the sun above the dam’s spillway along a decaying cable slung between transmission poles, a long line of forktailed drongos jostled and shrilled above the pump, which was forcing the water through a series of underground pipes to Taylor- Freeme’s maize planted earlier in the week, which was just beginning to germinate.
It should also have been wetting soil for 8ha of seed which should be planted daily to meet the deadline.
His underground piping could irrigate more than 320ha if he had access to all his land.
Rare
Below the wide dam wall a few people were fishing for bass, hoping for some rare protein.
Before dusk two thin Zanu-PF youth leaders arrived to see Taylor-Freeme.
“He must be allowed to plant,” one said, suggesting that his own party was paralysed by internal rivalry.
He couldn’t explain, however, why Zanu-PF had for eight years bankrupted the agricultural economy on which Zimbabwe depended by kicking out all but a couple of hundred white farmers trying to survive on small sections of their original land holdings.
Eyes cast down, he said: “We want a better Zanu-PF.”
Assistant Inspector Katungunde, from provincial police headquarters, said his “boss,” commanding officer Chihuri, “had not stopped Taylor-Freeme from planting but is at a meeting and cannot talk to you until Monday”.
A police bakkie toured the farm twice but left satisfied. The tractors and planters were back in their sheds. Mission accomplished. No planting was going on.