Land Reform in Zimbabwe - Lancaster House Agreement

Lancaster House Agreement

After the Lancaster House Agreement negotiated a ceasefire and paved the way for democracy, in late February 1980 elections were won by President Robert Mugabe. The three-month long Lancaster House conference nearly failed over land issues. The "Declaration of Rights" that forms part of the Agreement and was entrenched in the constitution for ten years included a carefully worded section allowing the compulsory purchase of under-occupied land for settlement purposes, balanced by clauses requiring payment of compensation that could be remitted overseas. This clause was never used by the Zimbabwe government. The issue of British aid for land reform was not discussed at Lancaster House. Although the Patriotic Front representatives claimed to have received satisfactory assurances, no evidence of any secret deals is available.

In 2007, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth at the time of the Agreement, Sir Shridath Ramphal spoke out for the first time about a secret deal saying, "I took an initiative of my own as Secretary-General which isn't much known and talked about but can be now." Sir Shridath confirmed that in the face of collapse of Agreement talks and with the potential for reversion to civil war, 'he secretly contacted the US ambassador in London, Kingman Brewster, and asked him to get the then US President, Jimmy Carter, to promise money to pay white farmers for their land'. He quickly received assurances authorized by the American President, 'that the United States would contribute a substantial amount for a process of land redistribution and they would undertake to encourage the British government to give similar assurances'.

The British agreed after independence to help fund land reform on a willing buyer, willing seller principle, meeting 50% of the costs of land purchase and of the investments (water, schools, clinics, etc.) required to convert large commercial farms into viable resettlement areas for peasant or communal farming. Around 71,000 families (perhaps 500,000 people) settled on 3.5 million hectares of former white-owned land under this programme, which was described by "The Economist" in 1989 as "perhaps the most successful aid programme in Africa"

Britain provided 44 million pounds to the government for land resettlement projects.