Two articles appeared in BDLive this morning (and yes there are ways to read this without paying extortionate amounts for the content; as soon as the drop the price to something reasonable I will subscribe).
This paragraph sums up the need for black ownership of farmland
At this point, the landlessness of black people should be the most pressing priority. Land brings dignity and is capital to fund a better education, new businesses and an improved quality of life. We should have solved the restitution question many years ago and redistributed 30% of land to blacks by now. Without it, black lives will continue to suffer indignity and upward mobility will still be largely in the hands of the government.
Written by Sipho Hlongwane on the anniversary of the 1913 Land Act, the article provides a surprisingly objective view of the emotional attachment to land and the indignity of having that land removed from you. Sipho writes
Sol Plaatje famously put it: "Awaking on Friday morning, June 20 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth." In one fell swoop, the government of the day restricted black land ownership to just 7% of the available land, and later, under the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act of South Africa, that portion was extended to 13% — most of it a collection of "native reserves" that could not possibly support the country's growing black population. The results of this political act were immediately apparent. Blacks were either forced into unsustainable slivers of land or forced to move to white areas where they were ruthlessly exploited as cheap labour.
In this context it is easy to understand the emotional attachment to land. But Hlongwane conveniently omits a vital point that has been accepted by the government.
The government has long assumed a major land hunger among South Africans, which restitution is supposed to help fulfil. However, in April, Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti finally acknowledged that few claimants wanted land, for 93% (about 71,000 out of 76,000) had opted for financial compensation instead. Said Nkwinti: "We thought everybody, when they got a chance to get land, they would jump for it. Now, only 5,856 have opted for land restoration." People wanted money because of poverty and unemployment, but they had also become urbanised and "deculturised" in terms of tilling land. "We no longer have a peasantry; we have wage earners now."
This is taken from the other article in BDLive, written by Anthea Jeffery who is head of special research at the South African Institute of Race Relations. Anthea goes into a fair amount of detail about the pitfalls of the land restitution process and the ramifications of the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill which is now open for comment. Jeffery goes into a few issues that we are likely to experience if the bill goes through. The first one relates to verifying the claim.
According to Theo de Jager, the vice-president of Agri SA, which is the national voice of commercial agriculture, part of the reason is that would-be claimants have realised that claims are no longer being adequately verified. In the past, says De Jager, when people anticipated proper investigation, they hesitated to put in bogus claims. But now that probes are no longer rigorous, lodging land claims has become "a free-for-all, in which the only criterion is a claim form".
The second is purely an economic one, farmers will no longer invest in the land if there is a claim on it. This has a direct impact on food availability.
And finally – taking the lead from Zimbabwe, we need to consider that the ANC might just go for land grabs to retain its dwindling majority
Land reform in Zimbabwe — which Nkwinti was recently at pains to praise — has left virtually all land in the hands of the government, which leases it to people on a "use it or lose it" basis. This has given President Robert Mugabe's administration a powerful instrument of political control. South Africa's ruling party may also want the same for itself as its already declining electoral support withers further in the future.
This is not an easy situation to sort out. There is no doubt that people feel dispossessed but allowing for expropriation below market value could force our people to become refugees in Zimbabwe.