The South African government was set on Saturday to take possession of the first farm to be expropriated in a move designed to silence criticism that it is dragging its feet over land reform.
Land commission agents, along with chief claims commissioner Thozi Gwanya, will descend on Pniel Farm near the diamond mining town of Kimberley to meet with the outgoing owners from the Lutheran Church as well as briefing the dozens of tenants who will stay put on the 25 000ha property.
The farm was to have changed hands on March 15 but the outgoing owners have decided to leave without fuss and downplayed their disagreements with the government after failing to reach agreement on the sale after nearly four years of negotiations.
Until now, the South African government has been trying to meet its target of settling nearly 7 000 rural land claims dating back to the apartheid era before a self-imposed deadline at the end next year on a ”willing buyer, willing seller model”, but it has grown frustrated at the slow pace of negotiations.
According to Bongani Zulu, general secretary of the Lutheran Church in South Africa, there was agreement on the sale price of R35,5-million but differences over interest had proved insurmountable and the government had then taken a hard line.
”The whole process was managed in a proper way, except that we did not agree on the interest clause,” he said. ”It was not a big issue but the state decided to make it a big issue, which ended up in expropriation.”
Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana approved the expropriation order on February 13 following a pledge by President Thabo Mbeki in his State of the Nation Address earlier in the month to devote an ”extra effort” to addressing the land ownership issue in the post-apartheid era.
The government has been inviting restitution claims in order to redress apartheid-era land grabs in which many members of the black majority lost ancestral holdings that were often then sold on to different owners, such as the Lutherans.
Any redistribution of land will only take place once the restitution process has been settled.
Thousands of white-owned farms have also been expropriated by the state in neighbouring Zimbabwe but South Africa has rejected any such comparison. Farmers who lost their land on the orders of the government in Harare have not received any compensation, except for improvement work.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse last year, Gwanya said all the government wanted was to pay a fair price.
”We are not talking seizures here because we are willing to pay a price for the land, but it must be a just amount, not inflated sums.”
A recent editorial in Business Day newspaper said any suggestion the government was embarking on ”a Zimbabwe-style land grab is patently not true”.
”That the expropriation at Pneil is the first of its kind, coming only now that a stalemate has been reached after lengthy negotiations, indicates the government’s respect for the rule of law and its reluctance to us the state’s overwhelming power,” it added.
However, there are signs that the authorities may be abandoning their conciliatory approach with six farms in northern Mpumalanga being threatened with as yet unsigned expropriation notices. — AFP
