SA ‘to miss land reform deadline’

The BBC quoted a senior South African government official Thozi Gwanya as having said that the land deadline had been pushed back to 2025 because of a lack of funds.

Gwanya said Pretoria needed more than US$9.6bn to buy the remaining land, adding that to date only about five million hectares of land had been distributed and about 20 million hectares more remained to be bought.

At the end of apartheid in 1994 almost 90 percent of South Africas land was owned by the minority white community, who made up less than 10 percent of the population.

Gwanya said South Africa’s constitution stipulated that land had to be bought from the current landowners, but the current economic crisis meant the government had to postpone its plans.

No to land seizures

He ruled out seizing land in order to fast-track the process. “It has never been our programme to just seize land,” he said. “Appropriation will be used in the event that there is no co-operation by the current landowners, so far we have got a very positive support from most of the white farmers.”

South Africa, which like neighbouring Zimbabwe inherited an unjust and skewed land tenure system from previous white minority governments, had initially wanted to transfer over 30 percent of agricultural land to landless blacks by 2014.

While the ANC government is under pressure to quicken land redistribution, it has also been keen to reassure investors and the markets that its land reform programme will be orderly and not violent and lawless as happened in Zimbabwe.

But critics say many of the same problems faced by Zimbabwe, including lack of proper support for new black farmers and inadequate farming skills, are likely to hinder South Africa’s programme.

Social time bomb

The Confederation of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said land redistribution was one of the main demands of the liberation struggle and rich taxpayers should pay more to meet the deadline.

The powerful labour union that is part of the South Africas tripartite ruling alliance which is led by the ANC and includes the South African Communist Party warned that the land issue was a social time bomb that could explode if not handled carefully and urgently.

“An entire generation would have passed before we see this being implemented and that isn’t good enough,” Cosatu’s spokesman Patrick Craven said.

“We’re sitting on a social time bomb,” he said, adding that the recent township demonstrations over poor services were a warning.

“Those are linked to the land question. The fact that people are forced to move into cities to squatter camps… creates those kind of tensions. It would be far far better if they could make a living in the rural areas – the main reason they can’t is the skewed land ownership pattern which still exists in rural areas.”

Leasing land

Land reform is a sensitive issue in South Africa and has been brought into sharp focus by the decline of agriculture in Zimbabwe, where many white commercial farmers have been violently evicted.

Earlier this year, the South African government warned that it would take over any allocated land that was not being used effectively.

While last month, farmers’ union Agri SA signed a deal to lease 200,000 hectares of land in the Republic of Congo as it said the government’s land policy was forcing white farmers to seek land abroad.