Chihoyi, Zimbabwe - Gift Mabika had been unemployed for more than two years, so when a ruling party official offered him a job, he jumped at it. The work was easy - to camp on a white-owned corn farm.
Mabika, 23, packed up a bundle of belongings and left a shanty town outside Chihoyi in northern Zimbabwe for the rolling fields of Norman Farm, joining squatters and ruling party militants who have laid siege to about 1 000 white-owned farms throughout Zimbabwe.
Mabika candidly acknowledged he was being paid by ruling party officials, supporting accusations by the political opposition that the takeovers were engineered by President Robert Mugabe's government.
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Mabika said local officials of Mugabe's ruling party were paying him $Z600 (about R100) a month to camp on the corn farm, and that the party officials have also promised him free land.
For the past eight weeks, he and fellow occupiers have reaped corn for themselves, and received handouts of food and money from party officials, some of whom have traveled through the district in trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles with government licence plates.
"Times are hard. I am happy now to get some money," said Mabika, a former warehouse worker who is single and has no farming experience.
Mugabe insists the occupations are a justified protest by land-hungry blacks against the ownership by whites of about a third of the nation's productive land. He has not directly addressed assertions that his Zanu-PF party is paying the squatters.
Zanu-PF said in February it had given Z$20-million (about R3,4-million) to an organisation of veterans of Zimbabwe's independence war, that is purportedly leading the farm occupations. The group said it received the money to help campaign for the ruling party ahead of parliamentary elections expected to be called for May.
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