One solution to South Africa’s land-reform problem is to make available some of the ”huge tracts” of state-owned land around the country, says Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille.
”This land is currently unproductive, under-utilised and under-resourced,” she said in her weekly newsletter, published on the DA’s SA Today website on Friday.
”The … state owns huge tracts of land, both in urban and rural areas, acquired by various colonial, republican and union administrations over many years.”
Most of it belonged to the departments of land affairs and public works.
”The exact extent of the government landholdings is unknown, but the … state is believed to be a larger percentage-based land holder than any other government in a country with a market-based economy.
”This unused land is not only ‘dead capital’; it is hugely costly to maintain in its unproductive state.”
Zille — who is also mayor of Cape Town — said she had direct experience of this in the city, where the local government had to carry the cost of managing land and preventing illegal land invasions.
This was a bizarre state of affairs when there was such a shortage of land for industrial, commercial and housing use.
”Yet, the city council has been running into a brick wall in our efforts to secure the release of at least part of this land for affordable housing. We have not been given any credible reasons for this intransigence.”
According to Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana, about 11,5-million hectares of state land — roughly equivalent in size, taken together, to Malawi — was in state hands.
Zille said the state was unaware of much of the land it owned, much of it in and around urban areas.
”In rural areas, the state owns vast tracts of land suitable for restitution, but prefers to focus on the appropriation and redistribution of highly productive privately owned commercial farms,” she said.
”This generally results in the collapse of the enterprise, despite significant investment in ‘post-settlement support’.”
It was naïve to think high-value land, efficiently farmed and producing viable export crops for a highly competitive international market, could simply be transferred into group-ownership schemes, where institutional arrangements and management were both inappropriate and unproductive.
”Again, instead of destroying the capacity of existing land, government policy should be to extend agricultural production by putting the ‘dead capital’ of its substantial land assets to good use, through well-considered restitution and redistribution.
”This means that land transfers must be based on viable institutional arrangements that can survive in the complex and highly competitive value-chain of national and international agriculture.”
Zille also called for new ”bold and comprehensive ‘one-stop’ legislation” to confer free title to land in areas where traditional leaders ”have too much sway” over land usage.
”By upgrading and revamping land tenure, and selling off unused state-owned land, we can truly empower those in need,” she said. — Sapa