Dispossessed communities who missed out when the application process for land claims restitution expired in 1998 are pressuring the government to reopen applications ahead of the national Land Summit at the end of the month. The reopening of the process is expected to be one of the most heated debates at the summit.
Delegates attending the Gauteng Land Summit last month resolved that the national summit should ask the government to reopen the process. Other provincial land summits held during the past month also had communities urging the Land Claims Commission to accept late applications.
But National Land Claims Commissioner Tozi Gwanya says the government has no plans whatsoever to reopen the lodgement of claims. ”Most of the people who are making the request for reopening have expressly said that they want financial compensation, when we all know that payment of cash does not help to address the critical issue of skewed land ownership in the country.”
The commission is aware of no fewer than 66 000 elderly people in Gauteng who have organised themselves into a restitution committee and are demanding reopening.
Gauteng and North West Land Claims Commissioner Blessing Mphela has serious doubts about reopening the process. ”The financial burden on South Africa will be huge,” he says.
Mphela says research done by the commission shows that 3,5-million people were removed from their land during apartheid, yet only 80 000 people applied for restitution before the deadline in 1998.
”If just half of that 3,5-million decided to reapply, the cost to the country would exceed the National Budget,” says Mphela. ”Would that be an intelligent way of investing in development when other areas of development, such as employment, are crying out for more funds?”
Edward Lahiff, a senior lecturer at the University of the Western Cape’s Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, told the Mail & Guardian that reopening the restitution process to new claims at this point would be a huge undertaking.
He says that people want the process to be reopened because the government’s overall land reform programme is too slow, and that people are looking to their ancestors’ land as a way to secure their own future.
He argues that an accelerated land reform programme would serve South Africa better.
In the Eastern Cape, however, about 500 000 people living in the former Transkei and Ciskei homelands say they received a raw deal from the government. Here a particular category of claimants, those who lost land under the process of ”betterment” (forced villagerisation) in the 1960s, were discouraged from applying by the Eastern Cape Land Claims Commission, the very body set up to assist them.
Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza has been sympathetic to the Eastern Cape campaign. At the end of last year she set up a task team, headed by Gwanya, to investigate their request.
In Limpopo, Lucas Mufamadi, an activist working for land NGO Nkuzi Development Association, says hundreds of communities missed out on restitution because of a failed information campaign before the deadline.
He says the biggest advantage of reopening claims will be to reduce the tension between communities who benefited and communities who believe they lost out.
Lourie Bosman, president of farmers’ union AgriSA, says it would be ludicrous to tamper with the deadline. ”Restitution has to take place, that is a fact, but you have to have a clear deadline of what you are dealing with,” he says. ”Meddling with the deadlines will lead to much more uncertainty and mistrust.”