Barry Streek
The government has instructed property valuers to calculate the “risks of land invasion” because of their potential negative influence on property prices.
This is the first time the government has implicitly acknowledged the threat of land invasions in South Africa and their potentially devastating impact on property prices, particularly in commercial farming areas.
The latest instruction to valuers to quantify the potential negative costs because of land invasions follows assurances by President Thabo Mbeki land invasions such as those that have wracked Zimbabwe will not be tolerated in South Africa.
Earlier this week the Director General of Land Affairs, Gilingwe Mayende, said there was no danger of Zimbabwe-style property invasions in South Africa.
He told a press conference in Pretoria that the government’s decision to increase the tempo of land restitution was an incentive for people to abide by the legal process and hold fire on invasions and illegal occupations.
“I would go to the extent of saying that the prospect of widespread land invasions is not really on the cards at this stage,” Mayende said.
The Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs’s latest valuation leaflet suggests otherwise. It instructs valuers to look at “location specific factors” which could affect the valuation of a property.
In the past the department’s Requirements of the Valuation Report, a mandate given to valuers, listed as negative factors things such as “proximity to informal settlements”, “natural or environmental constraints” and “pollution”.
This time around, a fourth negative factor is added to the list: “risks of land invasion”.
Other standard criteria include the name of a property, its description and location, the price per hectare of different farm land use, improvements on the farm and its size.
Among the positive location specific factors, which valuers are told to consider, are the farm’s “proximity to markets, investment opportunities” and its “proximity to local/ regional centres”.
One land valuer said the inclusion of land invasions was “alarming, particularly coming from the Department of Land Affairs, and I think it could be read to be future government policy, similar to that in Zimbabwe.
“They are basically saying that land invasions can be expected and their impact on the value of property has to be assessed. If this is going to be the picture in the future we will have serious problems. It is going to be deadly serious,” said the valuer, who asked to remain anonymous.
He added that “the proximity to an informal settlement” was already a major factor in valuations because the prices of land plummeted when this was the case.
The African National Congress government’s land reform and restitution efforts got off to a bad start, as government agencies involved were paralysed by excessively bureaucratic processes, which prevented the departments concerned from actually spending their land restitution budgets.
However, there have been signs of an improvement. The number of settled land claims jumped from 44 in April last year to 8?288 at present. Since 1995 a total of R317-million has been spent on the programme R136-million on buying land for restitution and R181-million that went towards financial compensation.
Mayende acknowledged that there was still a long way to go to process the remaining 59?243 claims but said a new trend had been set.
“It’s no longer a big problem, in our view, that we have such a large number of claims to contend with. If the same trend continues, we will be looking at the whole process being finalised in the not too distant future,” he said.