Negotiations between the Richtersveld community and the government on an out-of-court land-claim settlement are back on track, according to community leader Willem Diergaardt.
He was speaking after a 45-minute meeting on Tuesday morning with Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, in the minister’s Cape Town office.
”All I can say at this stage is that the negotiations are back on track,” he said. ”We have given ourselves two weeks to finalise the settlement agreement.”
The Richtersvelders have been engaged in a marathon legal battle over a strip of land on the Northern Cape coast that was taken over by the state in the 1920s after diamonds were discovered there. The area is currently being mined by state-owned Alexkor.
The Richtersvelders in 2003 won a Constitutional Court ruling upholding their claim to both the land and the mineral rights.
Since then, the government has been spending millions of rands in legal fees in the Land Claims Court to contest the nature of the restoration and compensation to which the community is entitled.
The court case was put on hold after the signing last year of a memorandum of understanding, setting out a proposed basis for a settlement.
However, after the Richtersvelders decided they were not going to include Alexkor in their post-settlement diamond-mining plans, the government announced a deal to amalgamate Alexkor and the Namaqualand operations of diamond giant De Beers, and Erwin told the community that the package in the memorandum ”falls away”.
Since then, the community’s lawyers have written to the chief land-claims commissioner giving notice to make funds available to the community for another round of court hearings.
But Diergaardt, who chairs the Richtersveld Sida !hub Communal Property Association, said on Tuesday that the talks are now ”back where we stopped on February 2, before the February 9 announcement about De Beers”.
He said the De Beers deal was raised at the meeting with Erwin. ”He again emphasised that it plays no role, or can do no damage, to our rights. At this stage I accept his word, but we would like to see the document [the deal between De Beers and the government] as proof of that.”
Diergaardt said that according to Erwin, De Beers and the government are, in fact, still busy with negotiations, to see what the value of De Beers’s Kleinsee mine is and whether it will be worth the effort to obtain a share in it.
”At this stage they cannot amalgamate [the mining operations] because they fall under two separate mining permits. There is a long way still to go, according to him [Erwin].”
Tuesday’s meeting was attended only by Diergaardt and three other members of his committee, as well as Erwin. Asked about the mood of the meeting, Diergaardt said: ”In negotiations, you are feeling out the other party: as it goes on, things improve.”
The Richtersveld delegation was scheduled to meet the African National Congress’s parliamentary study group on public enterprises after the Erwin meeting, to brief it on the land claim. — Sapa