Jim Day
AN apartheid-era plan to move thousands of farmworkers off government-owned farmland in the Northern Province into rural villages has resurfaced in the guise of land reform.
Many of the 5 000 people involved oppose the plan, saying they have not been properly consulted and promises that they would have first priority over the land have been broken.
The land at stake is a 70km-long strip of cattle country and government-run irrigated citrus and tobacco farms near Potgietersrus. Provincial land reform officials for the Gillimburg area have divided the land into 38 units. These are to be given to farmworkers who are at present landless.
The people currently living on the 50 000ha site are being encouraged to move into rural villages called “agrivillages”.
The plan is being implemented as a Land Reform Pilot Project by the Land Affairs Ministry and provincial and local agencies. It is the largest such project in the country. But it is the same plan drawn up in 1988 to integrate the area into the then Lebowa homeland.
“It’s totally bizarre that in the name of land reform, they’re doing old Bantustan consolidation which the apartheid regime failed to implement,” says Marc Wegerif, a former consultant on the project. Disenchanted, he decided against having his contract extended last year . “They’re basically setting up a township with no rights to the land.”
However, Elias Mahapa, the provincial Land Department’s manager in charge of Gillimburg land reform, says residents will benefit from roads, school, sanitation, electricity, water and other services, as well as small parcels of land, that will be provided in the agrivillages.
If residents do not want to move to the agrivillages, he says, they will not be forced. He cannot say what will happen to those who do not want to move.
The first of the agrivillages, to be called Witrivier, is to be built near a dirt road through the bush-covered veld.
The residents now live in mud-walled or scrap-metal huts scattered through the bush, eking out a living from farm wages, little plots of mielies and the few chickens that peck in their yards.
Rather than being accepted as a mechanism for positive change, the plan is seen by many residents as another way to oppress them.
When Mahapa and other officials tried to speak to residents about the plan last weekend, they were booted out of the meeting. Residents accused one of them, Gilbert Pila – a member of the Transitional Local Council who showed up at the meeting in a double-breasted suit and shiny rings on his fingers – of threatening to bulldoze their homes unless they moved into the agrivillages, a charge he denies.
But residents and others say some local officials want some of the land to graze cattle owned by themselves or their friends.
“Besides land reform, we are happy here,” said Fanny Motlanti, a young farmworker from the Gillimburg village of Luxemburg. “We want to stay here. If there’s any action to move us forcefully, we won’t like that.”
Zachius Moabelo, who lives in a hostel in Luxemburg, would prefer to see land reform offer farmworkers shares in the government- run farms already operating on the site.
But that option has not been fully examined by planners, nor have any other possibilities apart from the current plan. Department of Land Affairs documents show a R3-million planning budget to study both the agrivillage option and other proposals. None of this money has been spent.
Lack of consultation with locals is a major grievance. “They don’t want to talk to us. They just want to tell us what to do,” said Edith Phakgadi, from the village of Saint Holland.
Such problems prompted Land Affairs officials in Pretoria to slap a moratorium on the scheme late last year. But pressure from local officials to get the project moving led to the reversal of that decision.
“There’s no way we are going to stop everything and wait for a plan,” said Tshisa Madima, director of planning for local government in the area.
Advertisements have now been published calling for applications for 20 of the 38 parcels of land. People from outside Gillimburg can apply. Last week, another advertisement in a local newspaper called for Gillimburg residents to apply for homes in Witrivier .
People remember when Land Affairs Minister Derek Hanekom told them two years ago that Gillimburg residents would have first priority over this land.
Many now doubt that promise. Standing on the road leading to one of the Gillimburg farms, Samuel Ngoenya, who is unemployed, firmly gives his view on land reform: “I’ve been living here a long time, 25 years. I want to stay here. This land is for us.”
Sue Lund, deputy director general in charge of land reform in the Land Affairs Department, told the Mail & Guardian: “I am not convinced that planning was done in an appropriate way.”
But she was unable to say what might now be done.