President Robert Mugabe's gamble that his radical programme of land redistribution in Zimbabwe will stem growing disillusionment with his ZANU-PF government appears increasingly less likely to succeed as the countdown to the 2002 presidential elections starts.

With the election less than a year away - political observers in Zimbabwe anticipate it will be held in April or May next year - the spectre of food shortages hangs over a nation that once prided itself on its ability to produce enough food to feed itself.

Iden Wetherall, deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, notes that after months of denial - of insistence that the land redistribution programme and the emergence of a multitude of small scale farmers will lead to increased food production - Mr Mugabe's government has admitted it will have to import grain by early next year to avert massive suffering from hunger.

Even as the government prepares contingency plans to import huge quantities of grain for the first time since the severe drought of 1992-93 - a difficult manoeuvre for a country which has exhausted its foreign currency reserves - its spokesmen propagate the myth that production is about to increase spectacularly because they fear the truth will impact negatively on its diminishing support base.

Food shortages, on top of galloping inflation, a plummeting currency and scarcity of petrol, are hardly a formula to win the pending presidential election, especially for a party which has already been in power for 20 years.

Thus, as Tony Hawkins, professor of business economics at the University of Zimbabwe has observed, the Local Government Minister, Ignatious Chombo, predicts that small-scale production will increase fivefold next season. But, as Hawkins says, he does not explain why the financial inputs essential to the trumpeted increase are not provided for in the budget or where the foreign currency to pay for imported fertiliser, seed, pestiticides, fuel and implements will come from.

The belief that the expropriation of land from the mainly white commercial farmers will boost production rests on the fallacious assumption that industrious smaller farmers are the main beneficiaries of the programme. So far, however, the most conspicuous beneficiaries are self styled war veterans, many of whom are ZANU-PF zealots, whose skills in looting and penchant for bullying exceeds their ability and desire to work the land.

According to a spokesman for the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU), more often than not the "war veterans" do not even occupy the farms. They merely mark them off as reclaimed "stolen land" before moving on to the next targeted farmstead. Their markers, however, effectively define the designated land as off-limits to the white farmers, whom Mr Mugabe is increasingly wont to refer to as "British", though many were either born in Zimbabwe or are descended from non-British settlers or both.

The victims of the seizure of land by war veterans are not only the white interlopers of ZANU-PF propaganda. Farmer labourers are often beaten up by the war veterans as "collaborators" working with, as much as for, the "white settlers". The farmers are, of course, demonised as conspirators plotting to unseat Mr Mugabe by contributing money and organisational skills to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The CFU spokesman puts the number of farm labourers at more than 300,000. If their dependents are added the community of farm workers is a sizeable one of about two million people. He describes their general state of mind as that of a people who are "traumatised" by the war veterans.

The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, states: "As soon as farmers are thrown off the land, farm workers are the next target." Many have migrated to the towns, where they add to the growing urban crisis and to the discontent with the Mugabe government (which suffered decisive defeats in the 2000 parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe's towns and cities).

Zanu-PF propagandists equate the white farmers of contemporary Zimbabwe with the white settlers who invaded Mashonaland and Matabeleland in the late 1890s and with the first generation of white settlers who came in their wake. It fits the ZANU-PF image of them as thieves who stole land from the indigenous people.

But some white farmers only acquired their farms after Zimbabwe attained its independence in 1980. From that date no farm could be sold without the permission of the post-independence government, the CFU spokesman says. These post-independence land-owners had to be in possession of a certificate stating that the government had no interest in the farm they bought, he adds.

Thus, at the least, a portion of present day farmers have documentary evidence that they purchased their farms with the consent of Mr Mugabe's government. The same government now finds it politically convenient to depict them as the owners of stolen land.

Mr Mugabe and his ministers blame Britain for the skewed distribution of land. But if Britain as the former colonial power cannot escape responsibility, neither can Mr Mugabe's government.

Information provided by the British embassy in South Africa puts the financial contribution of Britain to land reform in Zimbabwe since independence at £44 million (excluding the £500 million in bilateral support for development).

But the main beneficiaries of British aid have not always been the "genuinely poor". All too often particular interest groups, including notables in ZANU-PF, surface as those who have profited most from reform. Hence the initial suspension of British aid by the early 1990s and Britain's instance that further aid is conditional on transparency, respect for the law and sound economic management.

Mr Mugabe has wagered that the strategy of using the war veterans to drive farmers from the land will win him votes in the presidential election before its economic costs add to the legions of his opponents.

His failure to win a ringing endorsement of his policies from his presidential confreres at the recent Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit may be a sign of growing, and powerful, opposition to his course of action in the region.