Perspectives on the impacts of the fast track land reform programme on wildlife conservation and management in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) which was launched by the post-independent government in 2000 to correct land imbalances created during the colonial era which favoured a small population of white settler community, must have had devastating effects on the country’s wildlife management system which was lauded as one of the best in the world. Although a lot has been written to reflect on how the FTLRP affected the livelihood of over 12 million people of which 95 percent were black, very little has been studied and documented to show how the violent nature and lawlessness processes of the land reform affected conservation of the country’s species of wild fauna and flora that straddled different ecosystems of the country more particularly those found in former white-owned estates and even protected areas that the black population claimed to have been their ancestral homes. This study is therefore timely, necessary and significant. It is timely in the sense that it is being carried out at just about the time that the whole process of land reform seems complete. It, thus, offers scholars and researchers alike a sombre and opportune time to take stock of how human interests during the land reform era, which began in 2000 up until 2015, affected wildlife conservation and management in Zimbabwe. Premised upon a theoretical foundation that recognizes the existence of a strong nexus between land use and the conservation of wildlife, the study is looked at from two contending paradigms namely the dependency theory and the rational choice theory not only to examine the history of how the colonial processes accumulated and unfairly distributed land to the point of provoking angry retribution by local black people of the country, but also on how the colonial government created a wildlife management system that depended mainly on white people and the Western countries for its management and survival. In its diagnosis, the study shows how complex the wildlife system was embedded to Western imperialism, but how the independent black government seemed driven by greed and incompetence to accommodate more exploitation of the country in favour of the former colonial master and the West while doing nothing to decolonise structures of dependency that alienated the majority of African people from benefitting from wildlife resources that existed in the country. Having used a case study approach to establish how newly resettled farmers and redundant ex-farm employees coped with challenges to conserve natural resources at four farms in Darwendale during the harsh economic environment of the FTLRP, it is also interesting to observe how the study conducted during the agonising period of COVID lockdown reverted to using cell phones to administer open-ended interviews to gather views from national stakeholder-representatives of RDCs, conservation organisations and safari and hospitality industry among others on how the land reform programme affected communities and their work as it related mainly to wildlife conservation throughout the country. The research findings showed quite a negative picture of rampant poaching, logging, habitat loss, overhunting, and many environmentally damaging acts as both politicians and ordinary people cashed in on the lawlessness to maximise their gains.