Barry Streek
African National Congress MP Pierre-Jeanne Gerber is Parliament’s biggest landowner: in his declaration of interests he has listed 255 properties he owns.
Gerber, who resigned from the New National Party in April, has a built a 60m-long house on the platform of an old station, Malan Stasie, outside Wellington. He bought the station from the state for R4 200 when the railway line was moved.
He says he just buys “rubbish” land which no one else wants. He bought his first property in Ashton at the age 11 for R500. He has kept this property “for sentimental reasons”, but now pays more in taxes than what he paid for it.
Gerber won’t disclose the value of his property empire. “I have got an idea. I know what I would expect.”
It stretches across four provinces, covering the old Cape Province and Free State. He has not even visited the 3 000m2 plot he owns in the town of Petrus Steyn in the Free State. “I must find time to go and look at it.” There are others in the Western Cape which he has not yet seen.
He says there has been no reaction to his property interests from the ANC. “I am most comfortable in the ANC. In fact, the ANC consists of all of South Africa.”
Now, he wants the government to make property ownership more accessible to the majority of South Africans.
“I think property ownership is the cornerstone of stability for democracy in South Africa, but there is too much bureaucracy. The state is the biggest landowner in the southern hemisphere. There is enough land for everyone.
“I can use my cellphone to buy R1-million worth of shares on the stock exchange, but if I want to buy a plot for R1 000 in the Karoo I have to use an attorney, the transfer will cost me double and it takes ages. As a buyer you should be able to go to the deeds office and register it, just like you do when you buy a car.
“If I want to subdivide property, particularly in the rural areas, the cost of the surveyor will be more than the cost of the land. If I want to buy a 4×4 for R100 000 I will have finance organised by the bank, but if I want to buy a plot for R500 in Laingsburg, the bank will not provide the funds. That is why there is a problem with buying land.
“You can have legitimate sex at the age of 16, you can drive a car legitimately at the age of 17, and at 18 you can vote legitimately, but you can only own land at the age 21, unless your parents sign as guarantor. The government should look at the whole issue.”
He points out that the majority of South Africans were not allowed to own property in the past and they knew more about hire- purchase agreements than they did about buying property.
Gerber (37), who is married and has two daughters, says: “Some people collect things like rifles. I like land.”
He grew up in a parsonage where his father, as a priest, was a bywoner (tenant farmer) and could never own his own home. His grandparents were bywoners and collected their wages from the back door.
“I decided that I never wanted to be a bywoner.” So, in his first year of school, he worked on Saturdays in a shop putting bread into plastic bags and collecting bottles. He worked every school holiday. By the time he was 11, he had enough for his Ashton plot.
He then decided that if he bought a property a year until he was 40, he would have enough property to ensure he would never be a bywoner. “But it snowballed.”
He even worked holidays after he wrote matric. With the proceeds, he bought a property on the beach at Franskraal.
Gerber says he was good at sport at school and might even have earned provincial colours, but when his friends played rugby, he worked.
He explains his approach to buying “rubbish land” this way: “If you go to a sheep auction, a sheep goes for nothing because it is sick. If it dies you lose R50, but if it heals it goes up to R300.”
Ever since he bought his first property, he has scoured auction and tender advertisements. If something interests him, he puts in an offer. “If it does not succeed, you lose an envelope and a stamp. If you win, you get a bargain.”
One of these was 22ha at the coastal town of Franskraal where he put in an offer of R2 000 to a liquidated estate without seeing it. He owns property in rural towns, some farms and some smallholdings.
In 1993, before he entered active politics, he discovered property he had bought in Calvinia had been expropriated from a church under the Group Areas Act. When he discovered this, he gave it back to the church. It was South Africa’s first successful land claim.
Gerber explains: “If I buy a piece of property, I always see if I can do something with it. If it can be proclaimed a nature reserve [he owns `10 to 12′ proclaimed nature reserves] let it be proclaimed. Property must breathe.”