BiAS 7 – The Bible and Politics in Africa
outs”. The church however, in the Zimbabwe We Want engendered
patriotism by citing scriptural passages such as Nehemiah 2:3 and
Psalms 137:1.
In 2000, President Mugabe embarked on the controversial land reform
programme in which he forcibly displaced the whites from their farms
and gave them to the blacks. The minority white farmers had arrogated
themselves vast tracts of fertile land and relegated the blacks to moun-
tainous and impoverished places where they were congested. Knowing
that the land question was at the heart of the war of liberation, the
whites made a provision in the Lancaster House Constitution in which
no land was supposed to be distributed for ten years after independence.
Thus constitutionally, any distribution of land was supposed to be done
from 1990 after this egoistic provision had lapsed. However, efforts to
redistribute the land were hampered by protracted negotiations with the
colonial masters.
The idea of redistributing the land in itself was superb especially consid-
ering the damnable inequalities which had for long existed between the
minority whites and the majority blacks. The Churches of Zimbabwe in
The Zimbabwe We Want maintained that land is a gift from God and
therefore a fundamental human rights issue. The Churches further
maintain that land is the means which God created and gave to human
beings together with everything that is in it in order to sustain life re-
gardless of ethnic group, political or religious affiliation, gender or race
(Genesis 1:25-30). However, the redistribution itself was not mainly
intended to address the colonial injustices but to vitiate the opposition
support. This explains why it was characterized by violence, chaos and
multiple ownerships of farms by high-ranking political figures. The
Churches opines that the land reform programme is a noble idea be-
cause in Biblical terms the freedom of those who have been oppressed is
manifest in the repossession of their land. However, with reference to
Nehemiah5:5, the churches criticized the programme on the basis that it
created disparities between the rich and the poor because of the irregu-
larities which are associated with it.
The land reform programme witnessed the total breakdown of the rule
of law in Zimbabwe. The legality of the land reform programme was
challenged in the High Court which ruled out that the fast track pro-
gramme should be stopped because it offends against the canons of the
laws of the land. However, the incumbent party continued to defy the