Fertilizer,faith, and the great disappearing hectares
In a stunning victory for poor record-keeping and excellent explanations, former Mashonaland West Minister of State for Provincial Affairs and Devolution, Reuben Marumahoko, has walked free after a fraud case involving nearly US$38,000 worth of farming inputs collapsed in court.
Article by Tinotenda Samukange
The Chinhoyi Magistrates Court ruled that the State had failed to prove that Marumahoko defrauded the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA). And as every law student knows, when evidence is missing, so too is a conviction.
Marumahoko had been accused of receiving inputs meant for 200 hectares of maize, only to plant 46 hectares. What happened to the remaining fertiliser, seed, and chemicals remains one of agriculture’s great modern mysteries, now filed somewhere between vandalised irrigation equipment and uncooperative rainfall.
According to the defence, vandals struck, drought struck, and the farming season struck out. The court accepted that misfortune, not misrepresentation, was the real culprit. Fraud, it ruled, could not be proven unlike Zimbabwe’s weather, which continues to defy all planning.
ZACC, having made a confident arrest in November 2024, handed the baton to the State, which then proceeded to drop it somewhere in the maize fields. ARDA, for its part, appears to have misplaced both its inputs and any detailed accounting of them.
The result?
No fraud, no recovery, no answers but full legal freedom.
To be fair, courts deal in evidence, not eyebrow-raising arithmetic. And legally speaking, planting 46 hectares after promising 200 is not a crime if supported by enough bad luck and broken machinery.
Still, for the average farmer who must account for every bag of fertiliser like it’s family inheritance, the case offers a powerful lesson: scale matters. At certain altitudes of influence, fertiliser doesn’t get stolen it merely “fails to be accounted for.”
As the dust settles, one thing is clear: justice was served strictly according to procedure. Accountability, however, appears to have been affected by drought.
