Harare, Zimbabwe – A card from the political party, not in cash, obtained his first land Alice Nasiyaya. In 2014, his brother-in-law invoked her about a group that distributed residential land in Harare, but their methods were not through the book. All that Nasiyaya had to do was to prove that she was a member of Zanu-PF, the ruling party of Zimbabwe. She showed her membership card, obtained the land and built a house.
She claims that people who initially allocated her land presented themselves as local representatives of Zanu-PF, and she believed them. But this land, she learned later, was reserved by the city of Harare to be used for an expansion of the airport. And three years later, the bulldozers of the Harare municipal council came and leveled the house.
The representatives of the Zanu-PF went on the day of demolition, collecting information on all those who have stayed in the region and promising to move them to another place which was put aside for the Loyalists of the Party like them. A year later, she said, these same representatives of Zanu-PF found another land.
There she built another house, where she still lives. Many others in her neighborhood have acquired land this way, she said.
In Zimbabwe, the ruling party has long used land promises as a tool to obtain votes, creating a patronage system that negotiates land against political fidelity. Although it is not new, the trend has become so widespread in informal neighborhoods like that of Nasiyaya in that it generated its own vocabulary: “Emusangano”, a shona word meaning “land of the party”.
But there is a setback of the medal to these terrestrial gifts: none of the properties that are conceived have titles in the country where they made their house. The state has mastered the art of keeping people trapped, suspended from the promise of title acts each electoral year without delivering, explains Reuben Akili, director of the combination of the Harare Residents Association.
“People have this hope and they will continue to vote,” says Akili. The inhabitants know that disloyalty could cost them the earth. They could easily be expelled, he said.
AGRIAGES Reforms for land gifts
This patronage network is an overflow of past land policies. Former President Robert Mugabe issued radical and controversial agraint reforms in 2000, converting 6,000 large farms belonging to whites in nearly 170,000 farms belonging to blacks, according to Human Rights Watch. But it was more than a simple agrarian reform: local populations call for this period the third Chimurenga, or the third liberation fight against the colonial regime.
A large part of the precious peri-urban grounds on the periphery of Harare have become a field of state, which Zanu-PF used as a political tool to offer well-connected party members, according to a national audit of 2003.
Part of the strategy was to build Zanu-PF voting blocks in urban areas, where it lost its support. Instead of democratizing ownership of agricultural land and stimulating agricultural production, agrarian reform has become a vehicle so that speculators buy cheap and newly available state land and resell it to a bonus without taking into account the product. At the same time, the Ministry of the Local Government allocated part of these lands to housing cooperatives, trusts and self-proclaimed “authorities” of state lands, all on the basis of their links with the Zanu-PF party.
“People have this hope, and they will continue to vote.”Combined association of Harare residents
Since then, the land allocation process has remained disorganized and not regulated.
Party officials deny the illegal allocation of land to supporters. Farai Muroiwa Marapira, director of information and advertising for Zanu-PF, calls for false and unfounded accusations.
“The president has been clear that he is president of all Zimbabweans. Therefore, if the land must be distributed, this is done on non-partisan lines,” he said.
The Municipal Council of Harare – which monitors the allocation of land and housing in the city – tried to intervene. The authorities in November 2024 promised to demolish more than 5,000 houses, some of which built on land allocated to people according to their political affiliation. But it is not the first repression, and the previous repression did not stop the spread.
Informal establishments increase quickly
This land allocation exacerbates the challenge of regulating infrastructure in the districts created informally. The houses are erected if at random that some are built in the middle of the roads, or directly on the shores of the Hanyani river.
About a third of Harare residents live in informal establishments, according to a 2024 report by the African Cities Research Consortium.
The process of purchasing public land technically belongs under the jurisdiction of the councils of local governments. The government can give land to local authorities, which are authorized to sell it. But going through this formal channel is an expensive, slow and prohibitive process. Some people have been on the waiting list to buy land through local council for years or even decades.
In addition, says Stanley Gama, director of corporate communications of the council, the city has no land to sell.
Even in cases where the terrestrial barons of Zanu-PF ask for money for land, it is cheaper than going through formal channels, explains Nigel, who asked that his simple first name be used, for fear of reprisals. He has three lands, which he says he bought at a lower cost because of his affiliation to the ruling party – but he has titles to any of them. He said he paid less than US $ 1,000 for what would generally cost between US $ 6,000 and US $ 9,000. Even if he loses the field, he said, he saved money on what he would have paid in rent otherwise.
“If you are attending meetings for young people, you get the land for free; But if you can’t find it often, that’s when you pay a low amount, “he said.
Marapira, the Zanu-PF official, said the police can stop people who sell land this way.
This will not work, explains Akili, combined director of the Harare residents association.
“It is very rare to see them be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned,” he says. “They are always linked to powerful people.”
