JOHANNESBURG – A regional court ruled on Friday that 78 white Zimbabweans can keep their farms because President Robert Mugabe’s haphazard land reform programme discriminated against them.

Harare “is in breach of the SADC treaty with regards to discrimination," Judge Luis Mondlane, president of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) tribunal said in a ruling that could have far-reaching consequences for Mugabe's government and the entire region.

"The 78 applicants have a clear legal title (for their farms) and were denied access to the judiciary locally," said Mondlane, stressing that Zimbabwe had violated the treaty governing the 15-nation regional bloc by trying to seize the white-owned farms.

The SADC tribunal was created as part of a peer review mechanism within the region. It aims to ensure the objectives of SADC's founding treaty, including human rights and property rights, are upheld.

Article 6 of the regional treaty bars member states from discriminating against any person on the grounds of gender, religion, race, ethnic origin and culture.

Top officials of Mugabe’s ZANU PF party and their relatives have benefited the most from his controversial land redistribution programme having grabbed the most lucrative farms seized from whites, with some having as many as six farms each.

The chaotic and often violent land redistribution exercise that Mugabe says was necessary to ensure blacks also had access to arable land is blamed for destabilising the key agricultural sector to leave Zimbabwe facing severe food shortages.

The Tribunal ruled that Zimbabwe had also violated the treaty by failing to pay fair compensation to three of the 78 farmers who have already been evicted from their farms, and ordered the government "to take all measures to protect the possessions and ownership" of the properties of the remaining 75 farmers.

"No actions may be taken by insurgents and others to interfere with or disturb the peaceful activities of the remaining 75 applicants," Mondlane said as he delivered the Tribunal’s first major ruling since it first convened in April last year.

The court’s ruling, which according to the treaty is binding, could set the Harare government on a collision course with its SADC allies particularly if it – as it has always done with court rulings against its land reforms – refuses to abide by the Tribunal judgment.

Zimbabwe's ambassador to Namibia, Chipo Zindoga, said the government did not yet have a formal response to the ruling, but warned the verdict could interfere in the country's controversial land reforms.

Chris Jarrett, vice chairman of the Southern African Commercial Farmers Alliance, said he hoped that Zimbabwe would respect the ruling.

"Today's ruling does not just stop here, it will affect the whole of the SADC region. It sends a precedent for the African continent," Jarrett said.

If it is respected, the ruling could influence land reforms in other countries around southern Africa where white settlers took most of the best farmland during colonial times and African nations now face a dilemma in how to give back land to black farmers without affecting food production.

South Africa – just like Zimbabwe – inherited an unjust land tenure system from previous white-controlled governments and thousands of poor blacks are still waiting for the African National Congress (ANC) government to deliver on its promise on coming to power in 1994 when it set itself an ambitious target of redistributing 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.

With six years before the delivery date the South African government has only acquired 4 percent of land from private owners for redistribution, and says it needs to accelerate the process amid growing unrest among the poor landless blacks.

Once a net exporter of the staple maize grain, Zimbabwe has faced acute food shortages since 2001 after Mugabe began in 2000 his controversial land reform programme that saw experienced white farmers replaced by either incompetent or poorly funded black farmers, resulting in a massive drop in food production.

In addition to food shortages, Zimbabwe is also grappling with its worst ever economic crisis that is shown in the world’s highest inflation of more than 231 million percent, deepening poverty, unemployment, shortages of every basic survival commodity and a recent cholera outbreak that has killed almost 400 people. – ZimOnline