GRAHAM HATTY stared out over a sight he thought he would never see again. “It is beautiful. I feel like I have died and gone to heaven,” he said proudly as he surveyed acres of his own freshly planted farm-land stretching out to the horizon in a classic African vista.

Mr Hatty, 66, lost land and equipment in President Mugabe’s land grab. Now he is one of 13 white Zimbabwean farmers who have accepted a challenge that has left many staring at them in disbelief: come and start over again in Nigeria.

“People said you have to be nuts to go over there but we were simply bowled over when we came over to have a look,” said Mr Hatty, who has just finished sowing his first crops. “The potential here is amazing. The soil is magnificent.”

As he walked through fields sprouting with green shoots and full of freshly recruited farm workers, he added: “I would not have missed this for the world. I am very optimistic. The people here are great workers, very welcoming. I would not go back even if I got the farm back.”

The group was invited to resettle in Nigeria’s western Kwara state last year, but many thought the project would never get off the ground. Now, after a year of living in tents, battling with malaria and clearing dense bush from virgin land, the commercial farmers say that they have proved people wrong.

Alan Jack, another of the farmers, said: “We have been given an opportunity for a second chance and we took it. We are Africans, after all, and we have no intention of leaving this continent. Most of us were born in Africa, and Africa is where we want to stay.”

Sitting on the veranda of a newly constructed home, Mr Jack outlined plans to set up an irrigation scheme from the Niger river, import about 2,000 head of cattle, set up a milk-processing plant and develop a poultry industry.

The farmers are expected to invest £10 million to £12 million in the projects. Most of the money is raised locally. “We are already employing some 2,000 people, but the knock-on effect, from tractor mechanics upwards, is huge,” Mr Jack said.

Mr Hatty lost land and equipment valued at £2 million after an army general seized his farm outside Norton, 120 miles north of Harare. “I hung on till the last moment, but it was obvious what would happen if I resisted any longer,” he said. For now, he lives in a hotel in the nearby town of Ilorin, while the younger farmers have made do with tents alongside their new land. “Mugabe ’s loss is Nigeria’s gain. We are not allowed to work in our own country so we have come here. Mugabe is watching closely and praying we’ll fail. We won’t.”

He is employing 320 local subsistence farmers who have seen their incomes treble. “They work on their own plots after finishing here and we hope we can train them so they can improve their own yields,” Mr Hatty said. Nigeria, a country synonymous with corruption, mismanagement and bureaucracy, has no shortage of good farming land, but it has been left uncultivated. The country spends more than £2 billion a year on food imports.

The scheme was the idea of Kwara state’s governor, Bukola Saraki, a former economic adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo. He said: “These people really see themselves as African, and they have something we don’t — knowledge and expertise — and can help us develop farming here.”

Mr Saraki sent close aides to Zimbabwe to meet the Commercial Farmers Union after Mr Mugabe began confiscating white-owned farms and giving them to landless blacks and ruling party apparatchiks in 2000. “Given Nigeria’s reputation it was a tough sell, but we convinced them it was a win-win situation,” he said.

More than 90 per cent of the state’s 2.3 million people live off the land but the area has no commercial farms. Mr Saraki arranged for the farmers to lease more than 1,000 hectares each on a peppercorn rent for 25 years, with the option of a further 25-year renewal. He has arranged the installation of electricity and mobile phone networks. “I want more to come. Who knows, one day we may be able to export agricultural produce from here.”

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