If South Africa does not find solutions to its current land impasse, it faces “grave circumstances … that are most likely to spill over into violence”.
This is the ominous warning from an informal group of land experts who met in Pretoria earlier this year to analyse the constraints on sustainable land reform in Southern Africa.
The meeting was organised and driven by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies in South Africa (Plaas), based at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Present were representatives from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the Food and Agricultural Union of the United Nations, and Oxfam in the United Kingdom.
Its aim was to examine the repercussions of Zimbabwe’s land crisis for the Southern African Development Community. Of particular concern was the hemorrhaging of land reform in South Africa.
‘It is evident that land reform is not a priority in the wider macro-economic framework of the [African National Congress] government … the gap between government promises and the capacity to deliver land to the landless … is resulting in a critical loss of time,” they said.
Taken together, land restitution (cash payouts or allocation of land) and land redistribution amount to merely one million hectares, or less than 1,2% of the 86-million hectares of white-owned farmland. Between 1994 and 1999 the first democratic government settled only 30 of the 40 000 land-reform cases. By March this year the land claims cases had increased to 72 975. About 36 000 of these cases have been settled.
This is a far cry far from the government’s target of transferring 30% of agricultural land by 2015.
‘This creates the potential for destabilisation because land is a visual reminder of inequalities,” said Cheryl Walker, senior researcher at the HSRC.
It is this conundrum that Plaas, in collaboration with UWC, is addressing. A postgraduate diploma and master’s degree in land and agrarian studies, which was launched at UWC in 2001, have quickly won reputations as the leading programmes of land reform in South Africa.
‘The programme was established in order to meet an identified demand in the land and agrarian reform sectors in both South Africa and the Southern African region,” said Edward Lahiff, the programme coordinator. ‘This is the first time that the post-1994 land reform issues are being addressed. These include land evictions and the plight of those people who are marginalised during the process, such as women and farm workers.”
He said that the difference between this course and those offered at other universities is that UWC’s programme approaches land reform from a social rather than a technical point of view. Other degrees address land reform through courses in, for example, land surveying. This diploma ‘draws on international experience of where land reform has succeeded and failed, and then it asks why”, Lahiff said.
Robin Palmer, land policy adviser at Oxfam, said that the Department of Land Affairs’s lack of direction and implementation is a major point of concern.
‘Although the government has formulated policies [such as the Communal Land Rights Bill], there are no visible efforts at implementation. A weak, under-resourced department and a lack of political commitment because of more acute concerns facing the government are overshadowing the reform process,” he said.
He said the government appears to be prioritising housing and unemployment, rather than land, as development areas.
‘Although I can understand the need for the government to prioritise, I believe that South Africa will one day be judged on how it carries out its land-reform process. Land is often all that people have as a bottom line for livelihood security,” he said, adding that the need for a course like this is therefore ‘critical”.
Lahiff said the course is aimed at ‘policymakers and practitioners within the land sector [already] … It is not a terribly strong choice of degree for people starting out.”
Students are drawn predominantly from NGOs and government departments such as land affairs and agriculture. Geographically, students have come from eight of South Africa’s nine provinces, as well as from Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Tanzania.
The course is modular, and students attend intensive two-week teaching blocks at UWC three times a year. The modules focus on agrarian history, constitutional law, natural-resource management, international land reform, agricultural economics and sustainable rural livelihoods.
‘Land is unavoidable as an issue and the need for land reform won’t go away,” Lahiff said. ‘If there is a downturn in the economy, people’s patience won’t last for ever. This course addresses that concern for the first time.”