Jan Fortuin grew up on a grain farm in Malmesbury in the Western Cape. He dared to dream that he might farm one day, but knew that his chances were almost non-existent. He followed the route of many country children, moving to the city to make a living. But he longed for the country and eventually joined his in-laws in Vredendal.
In 1998 Fortuin’s dream came true. He was selected as one of four applicants from previously disadvantaged communities to farm Vredendal’s commonage, its municipal-controlled land. Fortuin and his three co-farmers tend 6,5ha of tomatoes, potatoes and grapes.
A critical factor in the realisation of Fortuin’s dream is, without a doubt, the political microclimate of Vredendal.
Town clerk Gerhard Ras — now the Matzikama municipal manager — believes municipalities are bound by Section 152 of the Constitution that he says, “obliges municipalities to ensure local economic development”.
He says the Vredendal municipality did not wait for the provincial departments of land affairs and agriculture, but went ahead and offered its “guardianship” to local black farmers. At the same time, it worked to bring local white farmers “into the philosophy of land reform and black economic empowerment”.
Municipal official Dean O’ Neil says the municipality’s support strategy includes allocating water from Vredendal’s industrial quota to the commonage project, encouraging local white farmers to give their expertise for free and making municipal resources available at a nominal cost. It also subsidises each farmer with R75 000 a year and loans additional money at a low interest rate. The provincial land affairs and agriculture departments lend technical aid and recently contributed funds to the project (R76 850 and R193 000 respectively).
Few municipalities around the country have shown this kind of commitment to land reform.
Commonage was created in the 19th century when urban whites were invited to graze their favourite span of oxen plus one cow for domestic use on municipal-controlled land. In a prelude to apartheid, residents of “locations” were not allowed to share this land. During the 1950s and 1960s municipalities were invested with the power to lease or sell this land.
After 1994, however, commonage became a land-reform issue. It was seen as an opportunity for the disadvantaged to access land through municipalities, saving the state the expense of building new administrative institutions.
In 1996 new policy was devised to encourage municipalities to make commonage available to previously disadvantaged communities. In sticky situations where commonage was already under lease to white commercial farmers, the national Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs came up with a grant for municipalities to buy new commonage. Individual grants were determined by the market value of the land in question, and in 1999 up to 25% of the land value was added to the grant for the purpose of infrastructure development.
The state has had uneven success in encouraging municipalities to open up land to the cattle and crops of the poor. The principal planner at the national Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs’s directorate for redistribution implementation systems, Sharmla Govender, says the department cannot enforce compliance. “We don’t want to be heavy-handed with municipalities — this would go against the Constitution.”
The head of the directorate, Carmen van der Merwe, confirms that individual municipal ordinances hold sway over the authority of the national department. “We have no political mandate, no legislation to say that they must lease to emerging farmers.”
Apart from the constitutional debate, commonage policy fits in with the development ethos of the Municipal Systems Act of 2000. The Act requires each municipality to submit a detailed scheme, an integrated development plan, to address the basic needs of its poorer communities.
The Act, however, stresses the financial sustainability of each municipality. In many cases the emphasis on fiscal viability has worked against the Act’s development intention, as many municipalities cling to income generated by old South Africa connections, such as leases to white commercial farmers.
There is, for example, a strong reluctance on the part of white commercial farmers in the Northern Cape’s Karoo Hoogland to relinquish commonage. Charles Williams, a fieldworker at the Surplus People’s Project, an NGO involved in the Vredendal commonage project, says some of these farmers are on the local council and, despite the fact that a land reform plan is required in all integrated development plans, “the municipality still dances to the wishes of the white commercial farmers”.
At a February 2000 workshop on commonage, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza expressed her disappointment in municipalities, questioning their commitment to the spirit and principles of commonage policy. She called for municipalities to actively drive commonage programmes, rather than waiting for NGOs and provincial departments to take the lead.
In response, a delegate asked the national department to help with the management of “group dynamics” and to step up social support.
Van der Merwe says that municipalities have only to submit a letter stating their intention to apply for commonage funding and the national department sends in someone to facilitate the planning process. When frustrated farmers’ groups approach the department for mediation, she says, it obliges. When asked whether the department had added social support to policy, Van der Merwe says: “Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we are still trying to make sure that the support is there. No, in that we have not signed any service level agreements with any NGOs for that support.”
Many land reform proponents believe that intensive facilitation should be automatic, and that dissenting groups should be made to thrash out a compromise. Boysie Williams of the Surplus People’s Project says that municipalities should be forced to fulfil a constitutional obligation to open up land for the previously disadvantaged.
The Director of Land Affairs in the Free State, William Barnes, says that commonage has far from shed its heritage of protection. In the southern Free State, “the town clerks are mostly white and some object to the fact that black people have been singled out for commonage”.
There have been attempts by dominant locals to shunt the more vulnerable from municipal commonage and, says Barnes, to “move their herd of 50 cows on to it”. In Bethlehem, in the eastern Free State, Barnes says that the mayor has moved into a fancy house on the town’s commonage.
In response to these reports, Barnes’s department is “scaling down” on entertaining applications for land acquisition grants until municipalities can prove their intentions to help the poor.
In the meantime, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs’s redistribution directorate has been unable to honour calls for an audit of existing commonage or the development of a “best practice manual”, which includes details of successful commonage models around the country.