South Africa is set to seize two more white-owned farms, one of them run by a church, to fast-track land reforms to rectify apartheid-era imbalances, a top land official said on Monday.
”The minister [of agriculture and land affairs] has signed the notices of expropriation and they have been sent. The owners have 30 days to respond, following which we will begin expropriation procedures,” chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya told Agence France-Presse.
Gwanya said one farm was located near the mining town of Cullinan, where the world’s biggest diamond was found, and the other in the Northern Cape province.
”The claimants to the Cullinan farm are two local families, while the local African Pniel community are staking claim to the Northern Cape farm, which is owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa,” he said.
Gwanya said negotiations in both cases had been dragging on for two years.
He said the state had offered R520 000 in compensation for the 106ha Cullinan farm while the owner was demanding close to R1-million.
The church owning the other property, spanning 25 200ha, wanted R70-million while the state had offered R35,5-million, which ”was higher than the market rate when the negotiations began three years ago”, he said.
”The more they delay, the more the land prices go up,” he said, adding that the minister of agriculture and land affairs was in the process of finalising four more expropriation notices for four more white-owned farms in the northern Limpopo province.
The South African government has set itself a target of settling nearly 7 000 rural land claims before a December 2008 deadline.
Pretoria is keen to finalise its lands claims and assure foreign investors it would not follow the same path as its neighbour Zimbabwe, which was plunged into crisis when white farms were seized and given to landless blacks.
Paying off
Gwanya had said in August that the decision to seize white-owned land if negotiations linger or end in deadlock is paying off with more and more farmers accepting the price offered by the state.
”These farmers have become more supportive because we are cracking the whip,” he said in an interview.
He said at the time a decision to issue expropriation notices to farmers if negotiations on the price or title deeds exceeded six months had helped speed up the land-reform programme aimed at handing over nearly a third of white-owned land to new black farmers by 2014 to redress the injustices of apartheid.
”They are coming round to the table and there has been a very good response in Mpumalanga, where 70 farms in the Tevubu area were identified for expropriation.
”Of them, 40 farmers agreed to our price at the last minute.”
Gwanya said that similarly 90 farmers in Limpopo had done an 11th hour about-turn out of 200 faced with expropriation notices.
And in KwaZulu-Natal ”there were 80 cases in which we were about to send the letter of expropriation when all of them came to discuss the price again”. — Sapa-AFP