Peter Dickson and Barry Streek
One of the Eastern Cape’s most influential lobby groups for farm workers and dispossessed rural communities, the Transkei Land Services Organisation (Tralso), warned this week that the slow processing of land claims in the aftermath of apartheid could lead to Zimbabwe-style property invasions in the impoverished region.
“The issue cannot be put under the table any longer,” says Tralso programme manager Simbongile Kamtshe. Rural people, trapped in a cycle of poverty and unemployment aggravated by recent mines retrenchments and crippling welfare grant reviews, are becoming increasingly frustrated and “capable of doing anything”, Katshe said.
The warning follows a similar ultimatum by a group representing 3E000 land claimants in the southern Cape, who have written to President Thabo Mbeki about the delays in dealing with their land claims.
Following a report on the ultimatum in the Mail & Guardian, the government and the Land Claims Commission have promised action, and say they are on the verge of settling three major claims in the disputed region. The Southern Cape Land Committee, which drafted the letter to Mbeki, also claimed this week that the National Intelligence Agency had questioned frustrated claimants.
By December last year, the Eastern Cape Land Claims Commission had received 7E293 claims since 1995 – 5E830 in urban centres and 1E463 in rural areas. It had expected to settle more than 2E463 claims by March this year, but has so far managed to finalise only 1E525, blaming the restitution process itself for the delay.
Commission representative Wanda Mkutshulwa said the 7E293 claims “only represent the number of claim forms received and not the number of claims – after investigation one always finds out that one claim form has more than one claim in it, especially in the rural areas where most of the claims are groups or community claims.”
The claims that have been settled, including those by 800 Port Elizabeth families forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s from South End, Fairview, Korsten and Salisbury Park (where even white families were dispossessed under apartheid’s Group Areas Act), have involved referral to other directorates, restoration of land rights, granting of new land or dismissal of invalid claims.
A total of 1E400 claims from East London’s West Bank are close to finalisation, while other claimants include Macleantown, Queenstown, Graaff-Reinet, Bedford, Farmerfield, Ndunge, Hofmeyr, Fort Beaufort, Zadungeni, Gwiji, Hankey and the Amatola and Wild Coast regions.
In the Wild Coast region, land issues have become a major obstacle to the securing of tourism investment projects in the Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative.
Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza, disclosing that only 4E923 out of 87E200 land claims nationally had been settled since 1995, said last October that the restitution process had suffered from the emphasis on judicial process and the requirement that each case be ratified by the Land Claims Court.
Mkutshulwa said, however, that “this has been shortened by the adoption of the administrative approach which leaves room for the parties involved to negotiate and agree on the terms to be followed”. The agreed terms are then forwarded to Didiza for endorsement, followed by the awarding of land or monetary compensation to the claimants, but it is a lengthy process that precedes the final negotiations.