Hope Fountain community members under the Mthombothemba Cooperative Company have raised concerns over headmen in their area who are selling their land for residential purposes.
The land was given to the people by the UCCSA church in 1981 to help the community members to make a living off it through farming activities.
Speaking to CITE in an interview, the Board Chairperson of the cooperative, Dingiswayo Chatagwe, said the headmen have been selling the land for a long time and part of the land reserved for farming and grazing had been turned into high-density residential areas.
“There are headmen who are making a business out of selling land that was given to the people. This land was given to the people by the UCCSA in 1981 so that people could enhance their livelihoods. They called it Mthombothemba Community Cooperative. The land is separate from the church. It has its own title deeds. It is private land specifically set aside to enhance the livelihoods of the community,” Chatagwe said.
“So what these headmen are doing is to sell this land as residential stands, for prices ranging between $400 and $900 depending on the financial capacity of the buyer. The people whose names of headmen who are selling the land that have constantly come up are Vusumuzi Ncube, Abednico Sibanda and a lady called Mabhena. We have confronted some of them but this has not deterred them.”
Chatagwe said there is no paperwork to support the transactions and whenever they serve the land buyers with letters of eviction, they sell the land to third parties to reimburse the money they would have invested.
“The challenge is that they are selling land that was earmarked for grazing and farming purposes. Now people who belong to the cooperative have no place to carry out their farming activities. These headmen tell people that they are selling people land that is in rural setup but does not come with farming spaces. Most of the area has been developed into high-density residential stands,” he said.
“The thing is there is no paperwork to support this transaction. As the legal liaison person for this, we constantly write letters to the occupants telling them that they are not allowed to be there and they demand the money they paid for the stands and what they used to develop the stand. So to be reimbursed, they sell the properties to the next person. This creates a cycle of back and forth of repossessing this land. Our land should not be sold because it doesn’t fall under communal lands.”
Chatagwe said they tried to report the matter to the police but they were advised that this is a civil matter and it should be dealt with by the courts and hence they have engaged their legal practitioners.
“We have advised our lawyers to do urgent chamber applications to the High Court and they are in the process of doing so. The police cannot do much to help the situation because they keep telling us it’s a civil matter. We have engaged the Provincial Minister and he promised that we will have a meeting with the alleged sellers later this month. We hope the meeting will yield favourable results,” he said.
Matabeleland North Provincial Affairs and Devolution minister, Richard Moyo, who has been on the illegal land sales in the area and in other parts of the province, confirmed the allegations and said the matter has been reported to Joint Operations Command for investigations.
“We have received these reports and we have engaged JOC to deal with the matter. This issue does not only affect Hope Fountain, even areas such as Nyamandlovu and Bubi are going through the same. The matter is being investigated and all the headmen selling land without the approval of the ministry will be arrested,” Moyo said.
“The only person with the authority to issue offer letters for land in the Minister of Lands. If you have not been sanctioned to do such by the ministry then you cannot. Such bogus peoples and fraudulent headmen should be arrested. Whenever people make these reports, we do follow-ups and investigations so that the necessary arrests can be done.”
