Ann Eveleth
Last year the National Land Committee fought tooth and nail to deepen the rights of rural dwellers enshrined in the Extension of Security of Tenure Act. This year it is poised to become a key implementer of the compromise legislation which came into effect on November 28.
The committee, an umbrella of 10 NGOs advocating rural land rights, was vilified as an “insignificant NGO” when it fought farmer organisations over the contents of the draft Bill aimed at preventing arbitrary evictions of farm workers, labour tenants and other rural dwellers. When Parliament adopted the Bill, committee organisers called it “a formula for legalised evictions”.
But last week the committee, together with the Centre for Applied Legal Studiesand the Legal Resources Centre,won a one-year R2,5- million grant from the European Union Foundation for Human Rights for a farm- evictions project which places the committee at the forefront of the implementation of the Act.
The project will run parallel to a string of projects which the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs’s provincial offices are putting out to tender because government does not have the capacity to implement this massive new law on its own.
The committee’s director, Dave Husy, said committee affiliates are expected to bid for some of these contracts as part of larger consortiums. If these organisations win government contracts, their role in implementing the Act will be even larger.
Explaining the apparent contradictions in the committee’s positions on the Act, Husy said their relationship with government was “double-edged … For land reform to succeed, [the government and land NGOs] have to draw on each other’s resources. But that doesn’t mean there is a consensus over policy or approaches.”
In recent years the committee has taken a hard line on the market orientation of government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) and criticised the private-property protections of the Constitution.
Last year committee affiliates began actively to work towards the formation of a new rural social movement which could raise the political pressure on government from rural people who form a large section of the country’s poorest inhabitants.
Some early indications of how effective the “pockets” of this movement already established will be may emerge in the upcoming “Speak Out on Poverty” hearings. The committee is one of several land-rights organisations facilitating the testimony of rural poverty victims at hearings on land and rural development due to be held in the Northern Province between March 31 and April 3.
But Husy says this critical approach does not obscure the committee’s co-operation with government land-reform programmes. “We come at the same issue from different perspectives. [The government’s] approach is supply-side, needing to deliver on land reform. Ours is a demand-side approach of working with communities who need land.”
For Husy, the committee’s criticism of the Act is a separate issue from delivery, because even though the Act enshrined new security-of-tenure rights for millions of South Africans and outlawed arbitrary evictions three months ago, many rural South Africans have no idea what the Act means for them.
Says Husy: “[The Act] affects … millions of people who need education and access. It’s such an intensive project that as much capacity as you can throw down will get sucked up.”
And that’s where the farm-evictions project comes in. Land affairs minister Derek Hanekom lauded the project as “a creative and constructive attempt by NGOs to assist in giving vulnerable people long-term security on land”.
The project aims to monitor evictions; promote lobbying efforts for the effective application of the Act; educate rural dwellers about their rights; provide legal assistance through network of attorneys; and bring rural magistrates on board by teaching them what the Act requires them to do.
ENDS