A bold agrarian reform pledged 10 years ago by the new dispensation in South Africa to rectify the injustices of colonialism and apartheid has progressed slowly with 80% of the land still held by the white minority, fuelling rising impatience among the landless black majority.
In 1995, the country’s first democratic government of Nelson Mandela introduced a two-pronged policy: to return land or areas confiscated during apartheid from blacks or mixed race people and to redistribute land to reverse historical inequalities.
The aim was ambitious: to farm out 30% of the 85-million hectares of cultivable land in 15 years to South Africa’s black majority. However, a decade after the formal end of apartheid, the objective is a long way off.
Only three percent of the land has been acquired by the government under the ”willing-buyer, willing-seller” scheme and given out to about 700 000 black South Africans, according to official estimates.
The pugnacious Landless People’s Movement (LPM) group argues that at this pace it will take the government 80 years to achieve its goal.
Land is a highly sensitive and emotive issue in South Africa as in the rest of the region and is not only viewed as a means of production but is also linked to hereditary rights and position as well as pomp and ceremony.
It is also the place where ancestors are buried and according to traditional belief they keep a watch on their descendants from their final resting spot.
The government of Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president in 1999, is perfectly conscious of the emotive nature of land.
At the start of this year he signed an amendment to a law on the restitution of land rights to speed up the process initiated almost a decade back.
However, the government has hammered it in that the process will not go the way of neighbouring Zimbabwe where the expulsion of white commercial farmers has fuelled violence and where a controversial land reforms programme has led to a sharp downfall in production, thereby plunging the once-prosperous nation into crisis.
But in spite of the repeated pledges to strictly adhere to law, the programme has not only sent alarm bells ringing among some white farmers but also been slammed by landless blacks as being toothless and insufficient.
For Agri SA, the main farmers’ union, the chief sentiment is one of disappointment.
”We are disappointed that the government went ahead with the amendment bill despite the obvious negative effect such an expropriation process would have on investor and business confidence in the agriculture sector,” it said.
The more radical but much less representative Transvaal Agricultural Union was much more trenchant and alarmist.
”It is clear that the government’s haste to expropriate land and to further ethnic cleansing will inevitably place South Africa on the road to a Zimbabwe situation,” it has warned.
Mangaliso Kubheka, the national coordinator of the LPM on the other hand refuses to be drawn into the controversy whether South Africa will go the Zimbabwe way but says the government has been woefully lacking on the issue.
”I don’t know the Zimbabwe situation,” he said, but added: ”The (South African) government doesn’t take this problem seriously.”
As the country’s third multi-party election on April 14 draws near the LPM has stepped up the ante asking supporters to abstain from a ballot which is widely expected to return the ruling party for a third straight term.
Kubheka, who puts the number of abysmally poor and the landless at 26-million — out of a total population of 44,8-million — has also warned of forcible occupation of land on voting day, provoking a strong reaction from Mbeki’s African National Congress.
The ruling party has termed the threats as ”hooliganism” and clearly said it will not tolerate ”any act calculated at intimidating people and stopping them from exercising their right to vote”.
In 2001, South Africa witnessed some forcible land occupation — not linked to farmland but merely some abysmally poor people staking some land to build a shack.
But the government has lashed out against such land occupations and warned clearly that it will not allow any situation like the one in Zimbabwe. – Sapa-AFP