Vol. 71/No. 10      March 12, 2007

In recent months the government has warned recalcitrant landowners that it will not negotiate over land prices forever, and that more expropriations will follow if settlements are not reached soon. The state has until 2008 to settle more than 6,000 outstanding rural land claims.

The dead hand of the past weighs heavily on the rural areas of South Africa. For more than 300 years—first with the advance of colonial settlers into Southern Africa, and culminating under apartheid rule—Africans were driven off their land en masse. These land seizures were codified into law with the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, which made it illegal for Blacks to own land outside of designated “native areas.”

By 1994, when South Africa’s first nonracial democratic elections took place, an estimated 87 percent of agricultural land was in the hands of white farmers. A large percentage of this land was concentrated in huge commercial estates. Today—nearly 13 years after the African National Congress came to power—a mere 3 percent of agricultural land has been transferred to Black farmers.

The government has legislated two principal land reform programs: land redistribution, the objective of which is to transfer 30 percent of agricultural land to Black farmers by 2014; and land restitution, which aims to reclaim land or provide financial compensation to families (or their descendants) driven off the land before 1994. While a high percentage of urban restitution claims have been settled, the majority of rural claims remain unresolved.

In his February 9 State of the Nation speech, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, acknowledged that “very little progress has been made in terms of land redistribution.”

The land reform programs have relied on the state purchasing farms at “market prices.” Only recently has the government suggested it may abandon its “willing-buyer, willing-seller” approach, adding in the same breath that there will be no large-scale expropriations. Massive delays in settling restitution claims have developed as white farmers hold out to force up prices.

Land reform officials are warning that more expropriations will take place if landowners do not hurry up and settle. “We have been negotiating with some white farmers for two or three years … and this has to stop,” chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya said last month. “From March, we will begin expropriating land for which negotiations have gone on for that period or more.” A six-month deadline would be imposed on new cases.

South African officials are anxious to avoid any comparisons with Zimbabwe—where President Robert Mugabe’s regime seized most of the white-owned commercial farms in 2000 and 2001. At the same time the government is ratcheting up the pressure on landowners in the face of evidence suggesting that land reform is failing.

“Contrary to what some alarmists have been trumpeting, there has never been any intention to go the Zimbabwe land-grab route,” South Africa’s agriculture and land affairs minister Lulu Xingwana said last October in a speech to one of the large commercial farmers’ unions here. “It is no secret to anyone in this room that this constitution recognizes property rights.”

At a land summit in 2005, he continued, “We agreed that the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle is not workable and that the instrument of expropriation should be used selectively … and subject to compensation.” The land minister added, “It is also in the country’s interest to speed up the process to avoid having a restless majority who want land unnecessarily becoming militant.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home