THE Restitution of Land Rights Act passed through parliament in November last year. It allows for the creation of a Land Claims Court and a five-member commission to hear claims by groups who suffered at the hands of apartheid forced removals.
The commission, which has already been appointed, has regional offices in each of the provinces.
The commission must try to resolve land claims as speedily as possible and does this by disseminating information about who qualifies to make claims and how they can do so.
In terms of the new law, this includes people or their descendants whose land was taken away by racial laws in the period after the promulgation of the 1913 Land Act.
The commission will help groups prepare their claims and then negotiate with the contending parties to try to settle the claims. These settlements can include cash amounts or alternative land as compensation in cases where it is not practical for people to resettle on their original land.
The law operates on the principle that current owners will be paid out at market rates, unless there is evidence that they obtained the property at cheaper- than-market rates because of racial laws.
This commission’s work will be supplemented by the Land Claims Court which, besides dealing with cases which the commission is unable to resolve, will ratify all decisions made by the commission.
Once the court makes a ruling, it will provide assistance to claimants so they can use their land in a productive and sustainable way.
Despite its symbolic and historic significance, it has been estimated that the judicial process of restitution will probably only be able to deal with claims from about a third of the 3,5-million people who were victims of removals.
Yet the government of national unity has promised to redistribute at least 30 percent of the country’s arable land to needy communities in the countryside — and to help achieve this, the land ministry last month set in place a pilot land redistribution programme under the management of consultant Sue Lund.
It has set up nine pilot schemes, one in each of the country’s new provinces. A total of R315,81-million has been allocated to the entire process. This means each pilot will receive R35-million.
In each of these experimental areas, some 30 percent of the budget will be used to assist groups and individuals to acquire land at market rates. Beneficiary groups will not be given land as a hand out. They will be expected to supplement the grant by collecting their own funds and by applying for credit from financial institutions.
The exact proportion of the grants and beneficiaries’ own contributions will be decided by negotiation in each of the pilots and mechanisms have been set up to promote discussion around these issues.
More than 50 percent of the grant in each district has been allocated for a more important purpose: a homestead basic needs grant that must be used either on a group or individual basis to provide essential social needs such as sanitation, water supply, schools, shelter, fencing and electricity. There is a heavy stress in the plan that these amounts reach the poorest segments of the community directly.
The remainder of the budget will be used to run community workshops, help plan a range of productive and sustainable land uses and contribute to survey and transfer costs.
A comprehensive organisational infrastructure is being set up to implement the plan. A national task force made up of government departments and non-government organisations has been set up.
Beneath it, at provincial level, will be land steering committees comprised of state officials from housing, ariculture, land and development departments, as well as non-government representatives.
This committee will, in turn, employ a pilot district manager whose job it will be to set up and co-ordinate district land reform forums. These “people’s organs” will be elected and have the right and the funds to appoint professional advisers to assist in devising a development plan for the newly acquired land.
It is hoped the local forums, made up of ordinary men and women in the rural areas, will gain the power and expertise to identify land for transfer to beneficiary groups, decide on how to finance these purchases through a mix of grant and self-raised capital, and design productive uses that comply with strict departmental standards.
The forums will be required to identify and plan around the economic potential of the targeted land and must ensure that their proposed land uses include long-term ecological sustainability.
The overall objectives of the programme are to:
* Ensure that the bulk of state resources for land reform get to sections of communities who are most
* Create an environment that enables historically disadvantaged farmers to get increased access to land.
* Build rural peoples’ capacity to plan and manage their own development and to promote co-operative interaction, through the network of institutional structures, between government departments, civilian organisations, professional planners and private
* Although productive farming activities will be encouraged, including those that are run by a class of entrepreneurial yeoman farmers, the scheme is envisaged as a multi-class programme designed primarily to protect the livelihoods of the poorest segments of rural society — people who rely on land simply as a place to live, build a decent home where they can use electricity and running water and practice subsistence