Over 250 villagers formerly under prominent Zimbabwean traditional leader and politician, Chief Fortune Zephania Charumbira gathered at Masvingo Rural District council offices this week on Tuesday in protest over the alleged sale of their ancestral lands, The Herald reported. The villagers led by headmen and the Committee of 7 responsible for administrative issues are petitioning the district council boss, Mr. Roy Hove over the rampant partition and allocation of land to new settlers in wards that were formerly under Charumbira. The traditional leader who now occupies the top seat of the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament has not issued a public comment over Bere affairs.
The wards 7,9,10 and 11, were handed back to Bere after the reinstatement of the chieftainship at an event officiated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa in November. The installment of Chief Bere happened under the full knowledge and agreement of Charumbira who in August, jetted back into the country amid PAP sessions in South Africa to meet President Mnangagwa during his visit to the southern province where matters as such could have been discussed, according to sources.
Like many places across the small land-locked African country where land costs the price of life itself, land barons are being accused of abusing respective political banners and targeting the communal lands administered by local councils. This has resulted in the rampant partitioning, parceling, and selling of land including that which villagers claim as ancestral ownership.
The mushrooming of illegal settlements, overgrazing, and severe land degradation are among the growing hazards reported on former grazing lands being claimed by Charumbira villagers as potential sources of conflict too. The lands are said to have been divided into commercial and residential stands, in a brewing case of abuse of office, according to reports.
Overnight success stories like the mayor himself Roy Hove, Goddard Dunira Hungwe, and Chivi Central Member of Parliament, Ephraim Gwanongodza have been on the long list of barons and bureaucrats accused of grabbing villagers’ land in the last 5 years. The reinstatement of Chief Bere saw 300 village heads being installed and Mayor Roy Hove’s had his hand over the whole affair, it is said. Now Charumbira’s former subjects are witnessing unprecedented commercial encroachment and distribution of their ancestral land, which according to culture and tradition, is a taboo.
This is not the first incident that has exposed forms of power and patronage that have emerged in the second republic whereby individuals abuse political banners, capitalize on land allocation, and Zimbabwe’s reputed cultures of corruption flourish. In 2018 a group of war veterans reportedly protested eviction from a reallocated farm along the Beitbridge-Masvingo highway, demanding only to be addressed by the President or their Chief Charumbira.
