Ann Eveleth
Four years ago President Nelson Mandela jetted into Weenen – the “place of weeping” – to preach the gospel of government land reform to an audience of landless farmworkers, insecure labour tenants and recalcitrant white farmers.
Launching KwaZulu-Natal’s R35-million pilot land reform programme in 1995, Mandela promised to reverse land apartheid and bridge a chasm more fundamental than the political violence that plagued the province. Crop burnings, stock theft and police brutality were the stuff of the stand-off between the landowners and the tillers they regularly displaced to the side of the nearest road.
Today the farmworkers of Weenen, Muden, Estcourt and Colenso still march against paltry wages, evictions and apathetic local government officials, but the crop burnings, violent evictions and land invasions have given way to negotiations and legal processes.
It’s been a long, bumpy road for the province’s 4,2-million rural residents and the tiny group of government land reformers assigned to land reform’s most important province, but the ground is finally beginning to shift.
“Land reform is a long-term programme,” says KwaZulu-Natal Department of Land Affairs director Richard Clasey. Five years after land reform began, four years after Mandela launched the pilot project and three years after the national Department of Land Affairs opened a provincial office in Pietermaritzburg with a staff of four, Clasey can finally point to projects where development is happening.
The British crown ripped the land from the Zondi community as punishment for their role in the 1906 Bambata Rebellion. Today the community of 500 families holds the title deed to more than 10 000ha of their ancestral land.
Government grants and project planning have helped shape a new vision for the Zondis’ future. The vision stretches from the small but prosperous 2 000ha game ranch – where rich Texans and Montanans already pay a fortune to bag an impala trophy -to the hordes of tourists the Zondis hope will one day visit their planned cultural village and walk in awe through the historic site of Bambata’s Kraal.
The project is one of several on the verge of the long-awaited implementation phase. That is the point where the provincial department has finished its work – land has been designated, purchased and transferred to a legal entity and development plans have been completed – and the project is ready to be handed over to regional councils to begin addressing basic needs, like water and roads.
KwaZulu-Natal fared poorly in a departmental quality of life report released in January, with most land reform beneficiaries lacking essential services and the means to turn their new land into a source of income. Clasey says the report looked at “problematic” projects launched under the previous government. But his own statistics admit only a dozen of the 226 projects in the province have reached the implementation phase where service provision can be addressed.
Where this is happening, like the former presidential lead project at Cornfields, where 80 community members are paid to dig their own water reticulation trenches and roads, the sense of movement is palpable. But more than half of the province’s active land reform projects are still winding their way down the bumpy road to land transfer, and Clasey says the 450 labour tenant cases on the books are a drop in the ocean of land need in the province.
Land in KwaZulu-Natal has always been a political football, from colonial land dispossession to apartheid group areas and the creation of the KwaZulu bantustan. Battles between the Inkatha Freedom Party-led provincial government and the African National Congress-led national government over traditional leaders, the controversial Ingonyama Trust Land Act and local elections have kept land on a contested playing field.
“You can’t talk about land reform in KwaZulu- Natal without talking about the amakhosi [tribal chiefs]. Every time you confront land reform in this province, you confront colonialism and the history of the Zulu kingdom and its destruction,” says Clasey.
This means every land claim has to be dragged through a long process of historical reconstruction, to “unpack” the overlapping layers of land rights of different groups of people who have occupied the land over time.
Other conflicts, like that between farmers and their workers, have partially eased with the introduction of the Extension of the Security of Tenure Act, which lays down the law on evictions. The provincial department has formed a curious working relationship with the South African Agricultural Union- affiliated KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union (KwaNalu), making them a partner of the Network of Independent Monitors and the Association for Rural Advancement in a donor- funded project to monitor evictions.
Clasey says the farmers have gradually accepted they cannot resist the new land laws. In some cases, like the Scheepersdal project south of Muden and the Uitkyk project east of Colenso, landowners have taken an active role, even agreeing to hand over land without compensation so the community can use their grants for development. But in other cases the department is considering expropriation.
But these social hurdles are only part of the land reform obstacle course. Clasey says five years of reform has convinced the government “land reform happens best at regional and district level”. Unfortunately, land reform started when government at this tier was non- existent, and progress toward integrated rural development only began in late 1996.
“Now we have national and provincial governments devolving responsibilities to the regional councils, but without devolving the staff and budgets to carry out those responsibilities,” he said.
The department is now seconding staff on a project basis to regional councils to help them plan and implement the services land reform projects need. Money is also handed down through complex transfer agreements that are complicated by regional council fears of taking on more than they can chew.
Meanwhile, the province’s rural population is mobilising to demand its share of the new South African economic pie. Delegates from across the province gathered in Durban last month to help form a national rural social movement that will draft a rural people’s charter. The delegates cited more than 60 problems, from lack of services and slow land reform processes to local government officials who answer only to their political masters.
Clasey points out that the department is “unable to secure all the outcomes of land reform, like job creation, by ourselves”.
But declining land reform budgets this year, with expectations that KwaZulu- Natal’s land reform budget could be cut in half next year, just as the programme is reaching a critical delivery mass, are unlikely to convince those who are still waiting for a sign that their needs are being taken seriously in Pretoria.