Ben Hlatshwayo’s mistake was not in using his power as a Zimbabwe high court judge to steal a farm from one of his white compatriots. His error was in proving to be a decent enough farmer to catch the rapacious eye of the president’s wife.
It doesn’t do to have anything worth taking in Zimbabwe these days, particularly prime farmland with a crop nearly ready for harvest. But Justice Hlatshwayo, a veteran of the liberation war against white rule who was promoted from obscurity to the high court by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to give legal authority to the expropriation of thousands of white-owned farms, no doubt felt protected by his status.
He was rewarded with his own land, taken six years ago when he arrived at Vernon Nicolle’s 580 hectares in Banket, snatched the keys from the maid and declared the place his. The takeover was in breach of an order from Hlatshwayo’s own court but those were rough days, with white farmers being beaten and murdered, and there was little Nicolle could do.
But now Hlatshwayo has discovered there is someone higher up the pecking order of plunder. After Grace Mugabe’s gaze fell upon his farm, a clique of Cabinet ministers was assembled to tell the judge to hand it over and Hlatshwayo has been left bleating in court papers that “there is clearly no lawful basis” for seizing the land and accusing a holding company owned by Mugabe of “unlawful conduct.”
According to court papers, Hlatshwayo accuses the Mugabe family of being multiple farm owners but still wanting the one the judge took from Nicolle.
The affidavit says Hlatshwayo was summoned to a meeting with three of Mugabe’s then Cabinet ministers — security minister Didymus Mutasa, justice minister Patrick Chinamasa and agricultural mechanization minister Joseph Made — where he was told the president’s wife needed his farm. The Zimbabwe press reported that she wants to give it to her son from her first marriage as a birthday gift.
Hlatshwayo then complains that “there is clearly no lawful basis” for seizing his land and accuses the holding company, Gushungo — named after Robert Mugabe’s family totem — of being “intent upon imposing its will regardless of observing due process of the law.”
Mutasa responded by saying that Hlatshwayo has been given alternative land near Mutare in the east of the country.
His is not the first farm the president’s wife has targeted. She first took Iron Mask estate in Mazowe in 2003 from a couple in their 70s. Then she grabbed Foyle farm, one of the biggest dairy operations in the country. Production halved within months of the seizure.
Hlatshwayo’s problems might have been avoided if he had not proved to be a fairly useful farmer. Most of the Zanu-PF elite plundered farms for what could be sold for a quick profit and then let the land lie fallow, sometimes using it as collateral for loans to buy luxury cars and houses in plush Harare suburbs. The judge, on the other hand, produced a regular crop of maize, soya and sorghum.
Whatever the legal merits or otherwise of Hlatshwayo’s case against the Mugabes, he faces another problem of his own making. The courts are now so terrified of Mugabe and his cronies that no judge will agree to hear Hlatshwayo’s case.
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