HARARE – A group of white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe is looking to the administration of United States President Donald Trump to help secure billions of dollars in compensation following the country’s land reform programme.
The farmers have enlisted Mercury Public Affairs, a Washington-based lobbying firm with close ties to Trump, to advocate their case to US policymakers. According to filings under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), Mercury has agreed to represent the farmers’ interests without charging a fee.
Documents submitted under the filing show that Bryan Lanza, a partner at Mercury involved in the initiative, previously served as a senior campaign adviser to Trump and as communications director during the president’s first transition period. Trump’s current White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, is a former co-chair of Mercury.
Mercury is not new to Zimbabwe-related lobbying. Between 2019 and 2021, the firm represented the Zimbabwean government in Washington, during which time Harare reportedly paid a monthly retainer of US$90,000 as part of efforts to lobby against US sanctions. The United States imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2001, citing concerns including the country’s fast-track land reform programme.
By turning to Mercury, the farmers appear to be aligning their cause with a political narrative that has found resonance within sections of the current US administration. Trump has repeatedly claimed—without credible evidence—that white farmers in southern Africa are being persecuted by Black-majority governments. He has also promoted the widely discredited allegation of a “genocide” against white Afrikaner farmers in South Africa and has previously offered them refugee status in the United States.
In a letter dated December 2 and included in the FARA filing, Dror Besserglik, managing director of Johannesburg-based OB Projects Management, outlined the scope of Mercury’s engagement. “The services you will provide include contacting appropriate officials in the current administration and Congress to promote paying the Zimbabwean farmers,” Besserglik wrote to Lanza.
Zimbabwe’s government, led by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, agreed in 2020 to pay US$3.5 billion in compensation to former commercial farmers whose land was expropriated during land reform. The compensation covers improvements made on the land, such as buildings and infrastructure, but not the land itself. For 2026, the government has allocated US$10 million to compensate approximately 740 white farmers.
The issue has already gained traction among US Republicans. In September, Brian Mast, a Florida congressman and chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation seeking to block Zimbabwe from accessing new funding from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank until compensation payments are made. The bill has passed through the committee stage but has yet to advance further in Congress.
OB Projects, headed by South African businessman Oded Besserglik, was contracted by Zimbabwe’s Property and Farm Compensation Association (Profca). In his correspondence with Mercury, Dror Besserglik said OB Projects was also acting on behalf of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), the Southern African Commercial Farmers Alliance, and Valuation Consortium Ltd.
However, the CFU, Zimbabwe’s largest and oldest organisation representing commercial farmers, said it was unaware of the lobbying initiative. Its president, Liam Philp, said he only learned of the matter after being shown the Mercury filing by Bloomberg. Philp said he subsequently contacted Profca representatives and was told the CFU had been included “by mistake”. He said the union was seeking further clarification.
According to the letter, Mercury has been tasked with lobbying the US government to support Zimbabwe’s debt clearance process and the establishment of new financing arrangements that could “generate the funds necessary to satisfy” the government’s compensation obligations to former farmers.
Bloomberg, with additional reporting by newZWire.
