PREVIEW
Buoyed by the US President dismissing human rights policies and pausing anti-corruption laws, Harare had offered business incentives to Washington
Within hours of US President Donald Trump’s re-election on 6 November 2024, his Zimbabwean counterpart Emmerson Mnangagwa ladled on the sycophancy in a social media posting: ‘Congratulations to President-elect @realdonaldtrump on your election victory. The world needs more leaders who speak for the people. Zimbabwe stands ready to work with you’.
As Mnangagwa built his personal fortune, some of his key partners were white Zimbabweans such as Billy Rautenbach and the late arms dealer, John Bredenkamp (AC Vol 57 No 22, Getting ready for trouble). But he has failed to deliver on his pledge to pay US$3.5 billion compensation to white farmers who claim they were unfairly dispossessed of their land under previous president Robert Gabriel Mugabe (AC Vol 55 No 15, Seized farms haunt ZANU-PF & Dispatches 5/1/26, Ghosts of Mugabe are haunting Whitehall). Some of those farmers, who have hired Mercury Public Affairs lobbyists close to Trump in Washington, are now trying to disrupt Mnangagwa’s US charm campaign and get the promised cash.
Mnangagwa argued that, despite the socialist origins of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), he favours full-throated capitalism and welcomes US investors (AC Vol 65 No 12, Elon Musk’s Harare network). He followed up in April 2025, offering to suspend all of Zimbabwe’s tariffs on US imports‘to build a mutually beneficial and positive relationship’ – despite Trump imposing 18% tariffs on US imports of Zimbabwean goods that month.
By December, Mnangagwa’s campaign was having some success. US Ambassador Pamela Tremont heralded a shift towards ‘a balanced and partnership-based’ relationship centred on trade, investment and policy cooperation. Harare was offering open access to its lithium reserves to US companies, stepped up its gold exports (legal and illegal) to US ally, the United Arab Emirates, and said it would partner with Washington on migration management and human trafficking (AC Vol 66 No 13, London leads the long march back to Harare).
The activist group Zimbabwe Property and Farm Compensation Association (PROFCA), who hired Mercury, represent a minority of the white farmers who lost land in Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in the early 2000s. They are capitalising on the Trump administration’s sympathy for white Afrikaner farmers in South Africa who claim to be facing a ‘white genocide’.
Mercury has agreed to represent the PROFCA at no cost. It hasn’t explained why but political proximity may have helped. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is the Mercury former co-chair and Trump’s Chief of Staff. Bryan Lanza is the Mercury partner representing PROFCA, which had earlier contacted South Africa’s OB Projects. In OB Projects’ initial letter to Mercury, it claimed to be representing the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), the Southern African Commercial Farmers Alliance (SACFA) and the Valuation Consortium Limited (ValCon).
But SACFA and the CFU, representing the majority of farmers in Zimbabwe, have distanced themselves from the Mercury contract. Partly this is because they don’t consider the Farmers Compensation Agreement with the $3.5bn offer being pushed by PROFCA, to be an acceptable resolution.
In 2020, Mnangagwa agreed to pay $3.5bn white farmers displaced by Mugabe’s land resettlement policies: 50% in cash in 2020 and 50% in annual instalments over four years. The Global Compensation Deed (GCD) was signed by the government, the CFU, SACFA and ValCon. Included in the documentation was a commitment that no agreements with other parties would be signed. Some 3,100 former white farmers voted in favour of the deal. Yet apart from $20 million paid out to foreign landowners who had been protected by pre-2000 Bilateral Investment Protection and Promotion Agreements, these payments were never made.
In 2023, the government offered to pay farmers in ten-year Treasury Bills. Only 782 farmers voted for this option, and again, payments were never made. The CFU leaders, Andrew Pascoe and Harry Orphanides, were dismissed by the organisation. They now sit on the executive board of PROFCA.
As a break-away group, PROFCA launched its own negotiations with the government. Last April, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube announced that these farmers would be paid $3.1m in cash and $307.9m in ten-year treasury bonds. Pascoe, the deposed head of the CFU, was quoted in the state media praising the new ‘Farmers Compensation Agreement’ (FCA) as if he still represented CFU. But Liam Philp, the new chairman of CFU, insisted that CFU is not affiliated with PROFCA and did not accept the FCA treasury bond deal.
As none of these agreements have been honoured, PROFCA group is now looking elsewhere for leverage against the ZANU-PF government. This is, once again, being done without backing from most white farmers, and without their main representative body, the CFU. Resolving the compensation matter is critical to the country’s economic plan: land tenure and compensation is one of the three pillars in the Structured Dialogue on Arrears Clearance and Debt Resolution led by the African Development Bank (AfDB) alongside Economic Growth and Stability, and Governance. Zimbabwe owes around $21bn to sundry creditors.
The government insists it is complying with the requirements, at least on paper: in the week-ending 24 January it was announced that $10m was set aside in the national budget to compensate white farmers (Dispatches 1/12/25, Ncube presents belt-tightening budget then miners with an extra gold tax as growth slumps). But most farmers argue that offering less than 1% of the amount agreed in 2020 and five years late, is tantamount to nothing (AC Vol 61 No 8, Farmers back on agenda & Vol 61 No 21, The limits on the economy).
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