Despite all Derek Hanekom’s efforts the ANC might well have to resort to ‘radical measures’ to solve the land issue, argues Richard Levin
WHEN white farmers reacted with outrage recently at plans to introduce a land tax in the countryside, Land Affairs Minister Derek Hanekom made a simple appeal to them: give the landless some hope of access to land or face more radical types of reform in years to come.
Unless the African National Congress delivers on its promises to redistribute, the minister said, it will have to take more radical measures when the party faces re-election in 1999. “If there are still millions of people who remain landless … they will insist that more drastic measures are taken.”
Indeed the minister is walking a tightrope in his efforts to solve the land question, an issue that Francis Wilson and Mamphele Ramphela have described as a seismic fault that runs through the body of South African politics.
Land dispossession lies at the heart of colonial and apartheid oppression and efforts to redress this past rank high on the agenda of national reconstruction. So when the Restitution of Land Rights Act was promulgated last November, Hanekom received a standing ovation in parliament. And in the press conference which followed he described the law as being of great symbolic
But the victims of apartheid will need more than applause and symbols to overturn decades of disadvantage caused by various types of forced removals. Most commentators refer to the Surplus People’s Project’s (SPP) estimate that some 3,5-million people were relocated under apartheid as a measure of the problem with which Hanekom must deal.
Yet, by the SPP’s own admission, in its pioneering study conducted in the 1980s, this figure was an underestimate and excluded people who were moved by various betterment schemes that were conducted in the homelands. It also focused only on people moved in the post-1948 period.
Recently, anthropologist Chris de Wet has calculated that seven million victims is a more accurate figure — but the truth is that we just do not know the true extent of post-1913 social engineering in the
More importantly, it would be a mistake to assume that the victimised communities remain as homogeneous and identifiable groups capable of demanding unitary pieces of land. The land claims process is likely to be contested, conflictive and much lengthier than the five year period allowed for.
The most likely beneficiaries of the restitution laws are victims of “black spot” removals. These are relatively coherent communities for whom removals were an event marked by the arrival of government trucks and bulldozers which destroyed their homes and dumped them in the homelands.
But for large numbers of people forced removal was a more subtle, ongoing and chronic process. Millions of former sharecroppers and labour tenants saw land rights being eroded as farmers issued some family members with trekpasses while allowing others to remain. Many people were moved twice or more as labour tenancy was gradually phased out and eventually outlawed.
The restitution process demands that coherent groups of beneficiaries be identified. This poses two questions: what is a community and who decides? Frequently, the victims of forced removals lack cohesion and have been dispersed over a wide geographical area. Our countryside is a mosaic of overlapping claims which could choke the restitution process.
The land affairs ministry has pointed out that those who do not qualify for restitution can join the redistribution programme. Where land claims fail, people will be channelled through this second course of the reform strategy.
The central role of the market in the redistribution scheme reflects the role that the World Bank played in the development of South Africa’s land reform policies. Throughout the Third World, the spread of markets through this kind of ideological interference has made large numbers of people increasingly vulnerable.
Experience in other parts of the world demonstrates that the extension of private property accelerates class differences and consolidates a class of small but rich peasant farmers. Although Hanekom’s department is trying to reform credit institutions, this is a long way off and the banks are more likely to support black farmers who own private property than those who live on communal land.
This is likely to create the kind of “bimodal” situation that exists in the commercial agrarian sector of most countries in southern Africa — a core of efficient white farmers with a new smallholder class of rich black peasants added on, which grows wealthy while the majority of rural people remain marginalised.
Despite the dynamic way in which Hanekom and his team are approaching the massive challenges of land reform in this country, one cannot help but think that when the year 1999 approaches, the ANC will be looking at the more radical measures the minister alluded to in his recent talk to the farmers.
Dr Richard Levin is a land researcher in the department of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand