JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 60 ____________________________________________________________________ The case of Minister of Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development v Paliouras & Anor117 was a presage of the changed attitude which the new Supreme Court bench would adopt on the land issue. The case, in which two separate appeals were heard together, arose out the compulsory acquisition of the respondents’ farms by the State following the Supreme Court’s decision in the interdict case. The Court consisted of the newly appointed Chidyausiku ACJ together with four of the judges from the Bench which decided the interdict case. One of the issues to be decided was whether a land reform programme was a prerequisite to the Minister’s power to acquire land compulsorily under the Constitution and the Land Acquisition Act. Chidyausiku ACJ held that a land reform programme was relevant only to the issue of compensation for compulsorily acquired land in terms of s 16A of the Constitution, and was not a prerequisite for the compulsory acquisition of land under s 16. His argument was that a land reform programme is mentioned only in s 16A, which deals with the issue of compensation for land acquired for resettlement, and not in s 16 which sets out the requirements for a law that provides for the compulsory acquisition of land. Ominously, he questioned whether a court could interdict a Minister from acquiring land for redistribution in accordance with the explicit provisions of an Act of Parliament. His view did not find favour with other members of the Court, who said it was impossible to separate the issues of acquisition and compensation in the way he had done: agricultural land was acquired under the Land Acquisition Act, which had to comply with both s 16 and s 16A of the Constitution, so one could not speak meaningfully of compulsorily acquiring such land in accordance with s 16 as opposed to s 16A. The majority of the Court therefore upheld the view expressed in the interdict case, that a programme of land reform was a prerequisite to the compulsory acquisition of agricultural land for resettlement purposes in terms of the Land Acquisition Act. Some months after the period of suspension of the Supreme Court’s interdict had expired, the government brought the matter back to the Supreme Court to determine whether it had put in place a constitutional programme of land reform and had restored the rule of law in the commercial farming area. By this time three additional Supreme Court judges had been appointed and, with one exception (Ebrahim JA) the Bench consisted solely of new appointees. All the judges who had sat in the interdict case, except Gubbay CJ, were still available, and there was no apparent reason for