OWN CORRESPONDENTS and REUTERS, Johannesburg | Thursday
SOUTH African farms will descend into chaos unless the government speeds up its process of land reform to satisfy the demands of landless blacks, lobby groups and lawyers have warned.
Andile Mngxitama of the National Land Committee (NLC), a group of civil organisations working for land rights, said farms were facing an impending race war unless South Africa’s six million farm dwellers were protected from abuses at the hands of white farmers.
Mngxitama said human rights violations in the agricultural communities had reached “epidemic proportions” as ineffective land laws left farm workers and tenants at the mercy of white landowners.
“Despite the pleas of white landowners that they would not like to see a Zimbabwean-style situation in South Africa, the reality is that there’s already a war underway in the South African countryside, but it is one-sided, where blacks farm workers are on the receiving side,” Mngxitama said.
“The basis of the problem is land hunger.”
In the past five years, the government has settled 6 530 land restitution claims representing 110775 people driven off their land by the apartheid government. But this represents only about 10% of all claims – or 3% of claimants.
“There is going to be a serious breakdown of law and order if the process is not speeded up,” said Shadrack Gutto of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the Witwatersrand University.
“The breakdown is reflected in abuse and criminal violations of the human rights of farm workers…by powerful land owners.”
Agri-SA, a farmers’ organisation, agrees that land reform is too slow but wants to see the government release land faster.
Agriculture Minister Thoko Didiza has said the government intends redistributing about 30% of state land to blacks. She said the state wanted to resettle 70000 commercial black farmers on two million hectares of state land in the next 15 years in a process separate from restitution.
Mngxitama said the police, magistrates, prosecutors and the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) commandos were biased and defended the interests of white farmers in dealing with conflicts over land.