to
Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom went to KwaZulu-Natal to give away land, but it turned out to be no easy task, as this week’s guest writer Pippa Green discovered
WE are shooting north up the mountain pass to the dusty outpost of Jozini, which overlooks the shimmering plains of the Makathini Flats stretching east and north. A cool, sunglassed bodyguard from the VIP Protection Unit drives the 4×4 as fast as the traffic-blind goats and cattle will allow. His colleague, next to him, rests an R5 rifle gently against his knee.
To the top of the mountain pass, down towards the Pongola Dam, the fourth-largest in the country, east towards the flats where hardly anyone has running water, goes the new government in its hired car. Derek Hanekom, the minister of agriculture and land affairs, is easy but intent in his open-necked shirt. He is here today to give land away, or at least to discuss how it should be done.
This is not simple. In communities dominated by traditional leaders, who have – traditionally – allocated land, whom do you give the land to? Those who live on it? Those who work it? Or those who parcel it out?
Maputaland, which includes the stretch of the Makathini Flats, is one of the few areas of KwaZulu-Natal not owned by the Zulu king. Vast tracts – mainly along the Pongola floodplain – are good land, arable land.
No title deed means it’s hard for black farmers to get credit. So often the problem presents itself as money. Everyone asks Hanekom for money.
Here he is at the Mgindi experimental farm, a project, run mainly by white extension officers from KwaZulu-Natal, that services farmers in the dry southern part of the Makathini Flats. He asks a young black woman, Maria Hlabisa, the community liaison officer: “If we want to transform this area into a new paradise, what are the main things that need to be done?”
“I can say it’s money. We’ve got land here, but the main problem is money. They don’t have instruments to plough. They don’t have money to buy things.”
“We don’t have to do anything as far as land ownership is concerned?” asks Hanekom. “People don’t want to own their land?”
Maria Hlabisa smiles, then laughs “Yes.”
“Oh, they DO,”confirms Hanekom, his point made.
We drive further north along the dust track, parallelling the river’s course, until it curves slowly towards us and the land becomes greener.
Mboza is a village set in the middle of the floodplain, near one of the pans which fills to the brim and spills over on to the bright couch grass during the rainy season. It has been the preserve of a few key rural development workers from the anti- apartheid organisations of old. One such is blond, balding, ponytailed Clive Poultney, who helped set up water committees here more than a decade ago. They negotiated with the Department of Water Affairs about when and how much water to release from the Pongola Dam every year. Before that, people’s crops simply got flooded and their livestock sometimes drowned.
Poultney is well-established in the area. Years ago the chief gave him land on the edge of the Nsimbi Pan. Like everyone else here, he doesn’t own it.
The soil here is richer, richer than the southern sandforest. The prospects may be, too. Perhaps that is why the voices are stronger, the problem more clearly articulated.
In a small, sunny hall, peasant farmers, local health workers, water committee members fold themselves on to low schoolroom benches. “We have 30 000 hectares of irrigable soil, there is a unique wetland that lends itself to productive fisheries as well as opportunities for ecotourism,” says Poultney. “People who use those resources have had difficulty in commercialising – or improving – the resource base to generate income. And largely this is a function of the fact that there is no land security.”
This is echoed by everyone. Sipho Ngxonxo, a regional health director, is soft-spoken but adamant: “The farmer can’t develop his land. He can’t even plant a tree because the land doesn’t belong to him.”
In case this sounds too robust a nod to unfettered capitalism in the rural areas, Poultney is quick to qualify it: there can be different forms of land tenure. The cotton farmers in the south might want individual title, but those up near the Mozambican border in a settlement called Mbangweni may want communal tenure.
Someone else asks Hanekom for money. He laughs: “I don’t usually walk around with a chequebook in my pocket. But I do walk around with land in my pockets.”
He doesn’t want the land, he says. But HOW does he get rid of it?
The minister is polite, affable as always, but he’s clearly impatient. Firstly, he’s hungry. The meeting has dragged well past the lunch hour. Secondly, this is his third meeting in this little hall, and he wants to start seeing changes: “Let me be quite frank. As minister of quite a difficult portfolio, I want to succeed. But I need you, and largely you need me in order to succeed.
“Effectively it means that if there are some people who really stand in the way, first we try to take them with us, but then we must go ahead boldly.”
He exhorts them to draw up a list of what they want: “It might be a long list. You might want a soccer field, you might want a swimming pool. You might want a ROCKET – I don’t know – even a golf course – but clearly if you want land tenure and ownership of the land, the next meeting you organise must be with Ben Ngubane, my friend and counterpart in the provincial government. He was invited today and he couldn’t make it.”
At a late lunch – a feast of meat and pap at Poultney’s homestead – a large, smiling, gap-toothed man corners Hanekom. He is Mzimgeli Masuku of the Makathini Farmers Association. If, he asks uNgqonqoshe – the minister – he’s doing well growing sugar cane on his five hectares, and his neigbour isn’t, why shouldn’t he be able to buy up his neighbour’s plot? All this takes a long time to say, particularly as he says it in Zulu and it has to be translated.
Finally Hanekom replies: “If we were to start afresh, we give everybody the chance to buy five hectares, for the sake of equity. If there aren’t enough applicants then others can buy more. But we take more people with us. And then that natural process that my good comrade is talking about – and that I completely agree with – the person who does well should be able to consolidate. But give people a chance to begin with.”
Further north still, there is no talk of buying land, although, as always, there is of money. By now, we have abandoned the 4×4 to the bodyguards, still cool in the dust and heat, and flown by helicopter from the Ndumo Gane Reserve east along the Mozambican border fence, hovering over the Mbangweni Corridor.
Mbangweni is deep in the sand forest, a remote settlement in a web of endless sand tracks that continue a spidery trail to the flimsy border fence and beyond. Home to about 150 families, the scattered huts are sandwiched between the two game reserves, Ndumo and Tembe, which the conservation authorities have wanted for years to consolidate. The elephants in Tembe can’t get to the water that flows in abundance through Ndumo. But neither can the people of Mbangweni. They once lived where Ndumo is now, near the confluence of the Pongola and Usuthu rivers, but were moved to make way for the game park in the 1940s.
For years, the villagers resisted removal from this corridor. They were backed by rural development workers, such as Poultney. It was an intensely political battle, accentuated by the suspicion that Tembe was used as a training camp for Renamo soldiers.
Now things have changed. Poultney has been key in workshopping a new deal for Mbangweni, whereby the two game parks will consolidate, the villagers will stay in the corridor, but move further south, and in return they will regain access to a corner of Ndumo where the Pongola River flows.
Change is what Hanekom has come to speak about. But change, for this community, has always been cruel.
Hanekom stands before them under a tree. The villagers are seated behind a dilapidated barbed-wire fence, in the dust. The induna, Plankkop Tembe, tells him they have big hopes. It is the first time a minister has been here. They want to tell him things, like: “We were chased out like dogs from our old floodplain not knowing what wrong did we do.” Or, as a youth said: “Look at me. I am thin, uncommonly thin. And we never finished school. The reason is that the land was taken from our fathers and forefathers.”
Or that women have to go through a fence to a nearby pan in Ndumo to fetch water. This year alone, five women have been taken by crocodiles.
Someone asks whether they will be removed from their land. And anyway, whose land is it?
Someone else asks the minister for money.
Hanekom laughs, but there are few jokes in this meeting. The absence of Hanekom’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) provincial counterpart is more keenly felt. Some wonder whether it’s deliberate or an oversight.
“As you are sitting here today,” says Hanekom, “you did not necessarily vote for this government. Maybe you voted for another party …”
The other party is not with him. But he wants to talk about change.
He has three questions. Do you want change? What kind of change do we want? And are we ready for that change?
“You asked whether you will be removed from your land. The answer is no. Maybe some people have plans but they may as well bury their plans because this is not allowed. The question is, though, do you want to stay here forever? The answer is largely up to yourselves.”
Then on to the question of ownership: “The induna (headman) may say this is all my land. Maybe there’s an inkosi (chief) somewhere who says `uh, uh, this is all MY land’. Maybe the government says, so where’s your title deed? Officially this land on which you live, graze your cattle, belongs to the government.”
The crowd begins to bristle. A woman says that even if they didn’t vote for him on paper, deep down in their hearts they did. She says it’s like they have no government now. No water, no clinics, no schools.
A firebrand group sitting on the front row of chairs where only important people like the minister and the induna sit exhort the minister to cut the fence into the game reserve. Everyone thought the minister had come to tell them to go back to their old land.
This group calls itself the Top Ten. They are not from Mbangweni, but from the nearby town of KaNgwanase, nicely situated on the tar road with a hospital and running water. They are a crowd-pleaser nonetheless.
A cry goes up to cut the fence.
Hanekom holds his ground: “No, I can’t cut the fence. It’s not mine to cut.” He is looking for vision. Real options. “I know your lives have been difficult. But think with a vision. Think big things, not small things, because then big things happen.”
The game reserves are important, he says, to the region, and to the country. There is a tribe that was moved out of the Kruger Park, who have put in a land claim, just as this community has, but instead of opting to go back, they’ve gone forward and set up a private game lodge in a joint venture.
He tells the story of himself, a farmer who went to jail for the struggle. He’s not complaining. He tells of Nelson Mandela who went to jail for 27 years because he wanted change. He’s not complaining.
Apartheid rode roughshod over countless black communities. But you can’t go back. Do you want change? he asks again. And for the better?
But the Top Ten are not mollified. Where are the chiefs? Why were they not invited?
A Top Tenner, Albert Fakude, who is a local IFP member, skirts the crowd. He tells me: “We are concerned that the amakhosi (chiefs) aren’t here. Without consultation with the amakhosi at a national level, and even in our region, we cannot dicuss the land.”
Hanekom, though, plays a bad hand well: I respect the leaders. But the most important people are these people,” he says, gesturing to the crowd seated cross-legged in the dust. “A true leader recognises that.”
It is easier for people to move ahead boldly on the land question when they can see the future, as the sugar cane farmer on the floodplain can. He doesn’t care an iota what the chiefs think. When vision is clouded by hunger and thirst, as it is here, it’s difficult to see far ahead. Only what once was.
And it does not help Hanekom that this is fuelled by chiefs, spoken for by the Top Ten, and, Poultney tells me later, a more sinister lobby: gun-runners for whom the Mbangweni Corridor presents better access from Mozambique than a well-fenced game park would.
Today the guns, if not the runners, are there. For the first time, I see the minister’s cool bodyguard a little ruffled. He walks – fast – towards me. “I must get the minister out of here,” he says. “Many people are armed. All those who’ve come in from the outside have R5s.”
The helicopter throbs and whirls Hanekom away, over the land, his pockets of land, which he wants so badly to give away. Pippa Green is the political editor of SABC Radio