Sue Lund has calmly negotiated the ‘landmines’ of the land issue to write a balanced five-year plan for land distribution, writes Eddie Koch
TEN years ago she was an idealistic young student who wanted to change the world. Today, still looking wide- eyed and innocent, Sue Lund is doing just that. She is the author of South Africa’s single biggest social engineering programme since apartheid.
As designer and manager of the country’s land redistribution programme, a first step in the government’s five-year plan to parcel out 30 percent of the country’s arable land to the rural poor, her job is to reshape a terrain that has been skewed by centuries of colonial and segregationist policies.
It is an office of power; one fraught with complexity and danger, which she occupies with unexpected calm and predictable modesty. “I really don’t see why you should be interviewing me. There are lots of other women involved in land issues. You should do an article on all of us.”
That collective approach, she insists, is the great strength of the land redistribution programme. Its single chance of success in the face of overwhelming odds derives from a team of assistants who honed their skill in years of fighting forced removals in the countryside during the 1980s.
Which is where the 33-year-old woman’s path to an office near the Union Buildings in Pretoria begins. In the mid-1980s, Lund left home in Pietermaritzburg and went to Rhodes University intent on becoming a journalist. She ended up devoting most of her time to the United Democratic Front, the End Conscription Campaign, and the Grahamstown Rural Committee, which she helped form to fight the forced removal of “black spot” settlements in the Eastern Cape.
“It was an exhilarating time. We were all doing everything and reading about Lenin, Cuba and revolutions at the same time … It was easy to get distracted into land issues.”
During one of these distractions — a meeting at her home with people from the Thornill resettlement camp in Transkei to discuss how they could reoccupy their land — a bunch of policemen burst through the door and detained her under state of emergency regulations.
That was her first spell behind bars. The next came a year later. She was detained again under the emergency in November 1986 and released after 11 months with orders barring her from working with communities that had been forcibly removed.
“You know, you sit in prison thinking about life and it strengthens your resolve.” So when she got out she left for England where she studied at the University of England for two years and was awarded an MA in rural development planning with distinction. That academic experience was used to design the complex programme of land reform in South Africa.
Was it influenced by Lenin, Cuba and revolutions? “Let’s just say we have learnt a lot from things that have happened in-between,” says Lund — although the new-found pragmatism does not prevent her from doing tai chi as often as possible and writing a novel, sometimes on scraps of paper when her interminable meetings in Pretoria get boring.
Lund’s redistribution scheme (“please remember it isn’t mine, there is a team of us working on it”) relies on a range of mechanisms to reverse the effects of the past without resorting to expropriations and high-handed state interventions that have bedevilled land reform in many other countries.
Built into it are articulate replies to most objections levelled at the programme. On the complaint that the poorest of the poor lack the wherewithal to participate in land purchase schemes, she notes that a thorough review of the country’s credit institutions is under way and schemes will be implemented to ensure that those who don’t have existing collateral will get access to land purchase loans.
What about the moral argument that people should not have to pay for land that was stolen from them and the prediction that, despite the reforms, there will be mass land invasions in many parts of the country?
“I don’t think these are as likely as some people assume. Rural people are risk-averse and don’t easily look for conflict … There are plans to scale up the national programme even before the two-year period for the pilot projects is up. Within that time the pilots will expand as we develop a budgeting system for the rest of the country … We are putting a lot of faith in local government and local planning abilities.”
Concerns coming mainly from white farmers about possible degradation of land that has been reallocated to black settlers can be dealt with in local forums which will be set up under the scheme. Plans submitted by these to the provincial land reform committees will be carefully scrutinised for their sustainability, she says.
“People will have to look at things like carrying capacity, erosion and a range of possible land uses. Their plans will have to meet strict standards and must be environmentally sustainable … How this will work in practice, we will have to wait and see”.
Sometimes, when she sits in her Pretoria office pondering these things, or sneaking time to work on her novel, a fax will arrived addressed to Miss Land. There is a meaning in the mistakes. To many South Africans she is Ms Land: author of the single biggest piece of social engineering this country has seen since
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