afrol News, 1 December - Zimbabwean government has rejected a ruling by regional court in Namibia to halt the land seizure programme from white farmers, land minister said.

On Friday, the Southern African Development Community tribunal ruled that 78 white Zimbabweans should keep their farms as they were discriminated against when their land was seized under the ambitious President Robert Mugabe's land reform programme since 2000 which led to Zimbabwe's economic collapse.

State owned newspaper, Herald reported lands minister Didymus Mutasa saying the government will instead accelerate efforts to seize farms from the remaining white farmers and give it to black subsistence farmers.

"They are daydreaming because we are not going to reverse the land reform exercise," the Minister reportedly said.

The court said Zimbabwe had violated its treaty obligations by failing to compensate three plaintiffs who had lost their farms, and ordered the government to take all measures to protect the possessions and ownership of the others.

The ruling dealt a big blow to President Mugabe who never expected such a ruling from his peers, having been so lenient in resolving the long dragging political crisis.

Reports said less than 300 white farmers, out of around 4,000 originally, are left in Zimbabwe, the vast majority of them reduced to farming only small portions of their original landholdings.

White farmers in Zimbabwe were set on chase when the country made an attempt to implement its land reform policy by redistributing farms to its black and landless majority.

Since the government began to take majority of white-owned land, agriculture which was the base of Zimbabwe's economy, tumbled down. The country now has hyperinflation of over 230 million percent.

By staff writer

© afrol News

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