BULAWAYO – Zimbabwe’s power-sharing government is unable to audit President Robert Mugabe’s chaotic and often violent land reforms because it does not have cash to pay for the exercise, Lands Minister Herbert Murerwa told ZimOnline on Tuesday.

“Lack of funding is militating against the land audit. The ministry has not received the funds, about US$31million, to conduct the land audit that is expected to take six to nine months,” Murerwa said.

Mugabe’s programme to seize white-owned farmland for redistribution to landless blacks is blamed for plunging once self-sufficient Zimbabwe into food shortages after Harare failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.

The coalition government was supposed to have this month begun auditing the controversial land reforms to weed out top allies of Mugabe who grabbed most of the best farms seized from whites with some ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy.

It was hoped that the audit that is part of several unfulfilled provisions from last year’s power-sharing agreement between Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Premier Arthur Mutambara would lay the groundwork for a more orderly and equitable land redistribution programme

By Zimonline