THE image of a white being, frothing on the mouth, shouting that Zimbabwe cannot do without him has become a tired picture.
It is a fallacy that Zimbabwe’s agriculture needs the whiteman to work again.
It is a fallacy to believe the whiteman will return, one day, piece of paper in hand and reclaim any piece of land in our beloved country.
Zviroto zviroto.
It is an outright lie that the whiteman was responsible for agricultural boom in the country.
When Zimbabwe had the breadbasket status, it was black communal farmers on arid land who produced the grain that fed the whites and the rest of Africa.
Stoneman and Thompson’s Southern Africa Report Archive Volume 9 Number 3 titled ‘Banking on hunger: Food security in Zimbabwe’, notes that with the support of Government, the communal farmers produced about 60 percent of the marketed maize by 1986 and over 50 percent of the cotton, both up from below 10 percent before independence.
Large-scale commercial farmers (LSCF) at the time were focusing on production of cash crops, primarily tobacco and horticulture.
The report states that despite the underutilisation of much commercial farmland and production of less than one percent of maize by whites, this did not affect exports of grain.
Whites were not needed in the grain matrix.
In fact, we now know that white farmers were actually engaged in mining activities on the farms and attributed the huge earnings from the mines to horticulture ‘exports’.
They can froth at the mouth, but truth is the communal farming sector, on 74 percent of infertile sandy soils in marginal areas characterised by low and erratic rainfall, fed the country. 
Large-scale commercial farms of an average size of 2 200 ha, with more than 55 percent of the land located in high potential areas delivered nothing to this success we enjoyed.
Zimbabwe’s decision in 1990 to adopt a structural adjustment programme, at the behest of the Bretton Woods Institutions, resulted in a number of consequences for food security.
This marked the beginning of the downward spiral of agriculture sector by these lending institutions which were aided by the 1992 drought.
Zimbabwe could not be allowed to continue being self-sustaining and food secure and the centre that Africa could look up to in times of crisis, this would take out the West’s role of saviour.
Thus the reason behind the destruction of the country’s agricultural system was not the massively successful Land Reform Programme.
It began in the 1990s; whites in their so subtle manner mastered over hundred years of imperialism destroyed the country’s agricultural sector.
Zimbabwe became a breadbasket through sheer hard work on poor pieces of land.
Had African nations, Zimbabwe in particular, told the Bretton Woods Institutions to go and hang and not taken these structural adjustment prescriptions, the Nation would have remained a breadbasket.
Our programmes will bear fruits, eventually they will.
It is no secret that the West, through its financial institutions, determines who gets what to succeed.
And a withdrawal of these funds through sanctions imposed on nations has severely affected growth of these countries.
Let the frothing continue.
We remain on course.
We shall remain anchored to our land, our heritage.