South Africa: Rural Poor Bear The Brunt of Dysfunctional Land Reform
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11 March 2009: South Africa: Rural Poor Bear The Brunt of Dysfunctional Land Reform
One major blight on the last three terms of the ANC-led government is service provision to the rural poor, and in particular the provision of land and the requisite agricultural support. In general, the ANC government’s relationship with rural South Africa has been rather nebulous, and the land question has made this even more starkly so.
For the vast majority of the country’s rural households, land is no longer the primary lifeline, as it was the case before colonial, and subsequently, apartheid land dispossession. Neither is subsistence farming, nor agriculture. With the increasing dependence on social grants these traditional modes of survival are wilting away, along with the once cherished ideals of hard work and self-determination.
The previous ANC leadership fixated on being careful not to frighten investors and other big players by any radical government intervention in the land market, and the corollary has been inadequate public investment in the rural economy, and consequently poor access to agricultural land, finance and infrastructure.
As the country approaches the fourth national democratic elections, the marginalisation of rural South Africa is emerging as a key campaign issue, with the new ANC leadership going as far as labelling it government’s single greatest failure. While the causes of this failure are varied and complex, they are not unrelated to certain deficiencies in government’s land administration practices.
Globally, the management of land in state or public sector ownership is problematic, with a dearth of transparently implemented policies, frequent corruption in the administration of land assets, and lack of capacity to manage such lands effectively. This issue remains underexposed in global and national policies for capacity building and fighting corruption.
South Africa is no exception. There is no evidence that enough systematic consideration is being given to the vulnerability of the country’s land assets to incompetence, mismanagement and corruption. Government’s land reform programme is a case in point. A key element of the programme is the purchase of land for restitution at market prices from predominantly white private landowners. This has proved a highly emotive issue.
Established commercial farmers on the one hand bemoan the fact that beneficiaries are not using purchased land productively. The Land Affairs and Agriculture minister has now joined the row, coining a rather controversial slogan, ‘use it or loose it’, which essentially threatens to dispossess land claim beneficiaries for the mere fact that they have failed to farm for profit. This is incidentally the same sort of justification the colonial and apartheid governments used to usurp land from non-white communities.
Then there is the question of unscrupulous landowners who have seized the land restitution process as an opportunity to grow fat profits from grossly inflated land prices. Land officials themselves have been suspected of conniving with these landowners, in return for a share of the spoils. And to some extent the Land Affairs department has been complicit in these shady acts, namely by failing to verify whether the sellers are in fact owners of the properties sold to government. The purchase of food-producing land for golf courses and game farms has also emerged as a major issue.
Whatever the real issue may be, the progress of land reform has consequently been less than satisfactory. In 2007/08, government redistributed only 340 000 ha – less than 14 per cent of the intended target of 2.5 million hectares. Since 1994 only 4% of land, or four million hectares, has been transferred to black South Africans. The Land Claims Commission puts the latest figure at 5.2 million, but this is still a drop in the ocean even without considering the Commission’s propensity for unreliable and contradictory statistics. At this rate the target of having 30% of agricultural land in black hands by 2014 is a pipedream – a view that Land Affairs now fully shares.
This less than satisfactory progress is not just a matter of inadequate budget allocation, as Land Affairs is wont to claim. Nor is it simply a matter of a flaw in policy, namely government’s failure to define clearly the objectives and purposes of land reform, such as whether it intends to create an entrepreneurial class of black commercial farmers or to redistribute land to millions of South Africa’s landless poor. It is also importantly a question of unsatisfactory governance, management and administration of public land assets, which not only facilitates corruption but also degrades the economic, social and political condition of the rural landless.
While social grants have proven a critical palliative against poverty, they can neither arrest nor reverse it without a comprehensive, fair, transparent and effective rural land reform programme. Allowing social grants to overtake land-based means of rural livelihood will not only ultimately exhaust the social welfare system but also put the country’s food security in dire jeopardy – a perfect recipe for rural unrest.
Andile Sokomani, Researcher, Corruption and Governance Programme, ISS Cape Town
