By Noah Manyika|As soon as he was appointed Agriculture Minister, retired Chief Air Marshall P. Shiri talked about the need for land to be fully utilized if agriculture is going to be a key driver of our economic turnaround. In the minister’s own words last year:

“In terms of agriculture, we have to ensure there is production. All land has to be fully utilized, and apart from fully utilizing the land, we want productivity to be increased really. We realized that we contribute a lot towards the GDP of the country, wealth creation in the country and foreign currency earning and we just have to live up to the expectation of the nation.”

At a farm an hour’s drive from Harare where much of the reallocated land is lying idle, 12 tobacco barns and over a 100 former farm worker’s homes have been stripped of windows, doors and roofing. Electrical cables and the transformer have disappeared. Much of it happened under the previous government’s watch, but sadly some of it, including the demolishing of barns for bricks by members of the community is happening right now.

In the same area, expensive irrigation equipment on a farm thousands of hectares in size is beginning to weather under the sun from lack of use, while the fields are slowly becoming overgrown. While there are recipients of land that are putting it to good use, the number of former commercial agricultural land in the hands of people who are not making much use of it is unacceptably high.

I have no reason to doubt the Minister’s commitment to ensure that land is fully utilized. It is my understanding that the Minister is himself a very successful farmer. I have personally visited the Ministry offices and been impressed by the staff’s understanding of the problem and their responsiveness to enquiries. We will only succeed however if this not just the minister’s commitment, but ours as a nation.

Villagers must know that destroying infrastructure that could be utilized for the benefit of the community is not how we turn our economy around or win the war on poverty. Those who are holding on to commercial land they are not fully utilizing must demonstrate their patriotism by voluntarily making way for others who have the wherewithal to fully use it.

Just like any other auditing exercise, the land audit currently underway will only tell us the truth about what is actually audited. If the land controlled by influential people (which is the best of our land) is outside the audit’s purview, we will not turn the agricultural fortunes of our country around.

One sure way not to win the war on poverty is by choosing not to believe the obvious truths we see as we drive along our highways that many of what used to be the country’s best farms which are now controlled by influential black Zimbabweans are now failing dismally.

We will not win the war on poverty if we fail to see that the citrus estates in the Mazowe area are no longer what they used to be, or continue to pretend that the non-perfomance of what used to be our most vibrant farms which has resulted in our country importing wheat and cooking oil and hundreds of thousands of farm workers being unemployed, is not a big problem.

We will not win the war on poverty if it doesn’t matter that we used to be a major exporter of flowers to global flower markets, and that our beef slaughtering and dairy facilities were once world class, enabling us to export our meat and dairy products to lucrative global markets.

We will not win the war on poverty if we believe that those who point these things out are “enemies of the revolution” who want to see a reversal of land redistribution.

We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to make sure we make the best use of what in my view is our most important asset: our land. Not only will it employ us if we do, but it will feed us and our children and our children’s children.

Is there not a cause?

Dr. Noah Manyika is the founder and President of opposition Build Zimbabwe Alliance