It was the toughest of issues. Whites - 5% of the population - owned 80% of the arable land.

Millions of black people scratched a living on the rest.
For Mr Mugabe and Mr Nkomo this was critical.
Yet when Lord Carrington finally presented the draft constitution it contained no reference to the land.

White farmers owned 80% of the land before independence

Sir Shridath says the conference came close to collapse.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6958418.stm

the lands have been relocated as the blacks are totally in-charge now so we shld be talking about the consequences of the new ideas where blacks were given lands which they cannot use.
in totality, these lands have been laying waste with the zimbabwians dying of hunger.
commercial farmers are gone from zimbabwe.

That bbc news link was quite enlightening. I did not know that there were such negotiations and discussions.
Effectively, the British reneged on an agreement. Mugabe was playing politics with the land. The people of Zimbabwe suffer.

So, both the British and Mugabe are directly, by their actions or lack of it, responsible for the sufferings of ordinary Zimbabweans.

na wa oh

In Nigeria some reports claim 5% of the population control between 80% - 90% of the wealth. http://allafrica.com/stories/200701110121.html
http://publicintegrity.org/aids/country.aspx?cc=ng
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0704/28/i_if.01.html

Now what really makes Nigeria different from Zimbabwe save for the colour of the skin of the Zimbabweans who own majority of the wealth?

Who really owns the Land? Is it the black Zimbabwean who got the allocation after it was seized from the white Zimbabwean who bought it from the family of a white Rhodesian who seized it 150 years ago from a Shona who seized it from an Ndebele 250 years ago who in turn acquired it as spoils of war waged against the Bantonkas and Venda who displaced the original humans living in present day Zimbabwe 500 years ago?.

The land issue is a problem that may not necessarily be racial/tribal/ethnic but political and material. The Yoruba's say "Ti Oluwa Ni Ile ati Ekun Re" (God owns the Land and its riches)

A just distribution of land is good as long it is done in the overall interest of the country and its economy. But in Africa we are naturally a migrating "people" and the indigene and settler issue is very political.

In Rwanda & Burundi, the minority Tutsi rule over the majority Hutus, In Northern Nigeria of Old, the minority Fulani rule over the majority Hausa. Also in Liberia before 1980, the minority Americo Liberians ruled over the indigenous people for almost 150 years and later the Krahns, a minority ethnic group, simply became the new elite, replacing the Americo-Liberians. Citizens of a country no matter their ethnicity should have a chance to partake in the government of their country as long as it is democratically done.

All human beings are settlers anywhere they may be since Humankind originated from East Africa and then spread all over the world. Mitochondrial DNA evidence attests to this fact. In a nutshell some settlers are older than others.

Commercial White Zimbabwean farmers are chased away from their farms with their skills and replaced with Party faithful without faming skills or inadequate skills in an economy dominated by agriculture.

Some of Zimbabwe's Loss is Nigeria's gain in the Kwara State Backed Agricultural scheme.