ERASMUS: South Africa may use crisis to end land rows

Addressing South Africans days ago as he has been doing since the Covid-19 emergency struck in March, President Cyril Ramaphosa turned to the mass unemployment caused by the pandemic and lockdown.

South Africa has seen millions of jobs vanish overnight, some only returning with partial reopening.

The impact of the virus’ destructive economic effects are beginning to be measured in hard metrics, but are already widely felt among the poor.

The additional unemployment, which will only fully show up in future fiscal numbers, comes on top of a 30 per cent joblessness level.

The millions of former workers, each with an average eight dependants, have joined the long social grants queues to receive what amounts to a minimal living wage.

With an economy in and out of recession, the pandemic has brought enormous additional costs. It has brought plans for rural development through land expropriation, restitution and redistribution to a grinding halt.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Without funds to kickstart even a long planned infrastructure programme, the government cannot spend its way to recovery.

It instead appears to be looking at what amounts to a fusion of land restitution and job creation, putting farms more quickly into the hands of aspirant blacks.

Even before the Covid crisis, Ramaphosa had been explaining to nervous foreign investors that allowing land expropriation through an alteration of the 1996 founding democratic constitution would not lead to a free-for-all.

Expropriation, taken to right grievous historical injustices around land grabs foisted on indigenous people by colonial and white minority administrations, culminating in Apartheid, would only be used as necessary and sparingly, Ramaphosa said.

There are those in his ruling African National Congress (ANC) party who prefer something like Zimbabwe’s early 2000s land grab under Robert Mugabe.

But it is also understood that in reality, South Africa’s land restitution, while agonisingly slow, has not been held up by white farmers unwilling to sell or share the land their forefathers fought to hold.

It has been slowed by the government inability, at provincial level where it counts most, to deliver on support to emergent black commercial farmers.

That lack of support has been about access to finances and a skills deficit.

Officials deny this but the reality is that the large majority of land transfers since the 1990s have failed.

UNEMPLOYMENT

In addressing the mountain of unemployment, Ramaphosa has returned to his recurring theme on the issue of settling land-hunger.

He wants not merely land transfer but the successful nurturing of a generation of black commercial farmers.

This solution resolves or eases several problems at once, providing more employment, uplifting of the poorest, restitution of historically disposed land and preventing the loss of another generation from rural South Africa to overcrowded cities.

The main problem is that the vision has proved beyond the government’s ability to consistently and reliably produce the necessary support for what promises to become a major economic growth arena and a renewal of this country’s agriculture.

Given that land reform has been rife with corruption, South Africa’s frequently attacked white Afrikaner commercial farmers (called ‘Boers’ by those who hate them), may be the solution.

The leader of Afriforum, the platform which represents white farmers, thinks any land solution has to include them – as is ironically happening in Zimbabwe – because of the need for skills and knowhow transfer.

Afriforum leader Kallie Kriel told the Sunday Nation that there are initiatives where white farmers have taken matters into their own hands and are working with indigenous community representatives to establish viable commercial growing operations.

COLLABORATION

This sort collaboration, which did not need to wait for government or resources, has the capacity of unlocking black empowerment in agriculture, he said.

Such ad hoc programmes are already in the lush rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal and other provinces.

The biggest hurdle, Kriel and some of the white farmers involved say, is corrupt or inept officials.

When expropriation was under scrutiny, Ramaphosa repeatedly said there would be no tolerance for mismanagement or self-enrichment from land and agricultural reform.

As he addressed the problems created and exacerbated by Covid this week, Ramaphosa was determined to proceed with resolving the land issue.

There are successful community projects which flourished under the mentorship of the farmers, once despised but now appreciated by black communities.

These have taken place on land either provided by the government under restitution programmes or on pieces donated by white farmers to indigenous communities.

With Covid-19 having upended previous plans, it turns out that one of the side effects of its arrival in South Africa is that it may provide the missing element in driving home the need to adopt workable solutions to land hunger that benefit all, just as Ramaphosa has promised.

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