The ANC government sided with property owners and scapegoated the constitution for its failures in land reform, says land expert Professor Ruth Hall.
Hall, from the South African Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas), yesterday said the government had failed to use its powers of expropriation, redistribution and transformation.
“I would argue that we have a state that has chosen not to use its powers. It has chosen to side with private property owners and is now scapegoating the constitution for what is essentially a political failure.”
Restitution had also slipped from a pro-poor approach focussed on providing modest access to land for those in greatest need to a pro-commercial farmer model.
She said research showed most people given access to land via restitution were urban businessmen and not small-scale farmers from communal areas. “There is massive elite capture under way.”
She said at the rate land claims were being settled, it would take some 35 years to settle all the cases submitted in the 1990s.
It would take a further 143 years to settle the 160000 cases subsequently submitted.
Hall said none of the failures – whether in land redistribution, farm dweller land security or ownership in communal areas – were due to failures in the constitution. “It is about policy shifts towards a more elite vision of land reform, dysfunctional institutions, mismanagement and tiny budgets,” she said, describing the situation as a perpetuation of apartheid.
“We haven’t overcome that inequality despite opportunities to do so. Land dispossession underpinned political conquest and continues to underpin poverty,” Hall said.
Zenzele Ngcolomba, a member of the Prudhoe community to which the land claims court recently awarded 26 farms including the Fish River Sun, told of the 20 years of bureaucratic bungling and direct opposition it had faced from the government during the claim process.
He accused the rural development department of going so far as to sabotage rather than facilitate the claim.
Land reform consultant Siyabulela Manona pointed out that expropriation was just one means from a wide continuum for the state to acquire land.
“The manner in which you acquire land is totally independent of the tenure you adopt,” Manona said.
“Whether you borrow, buy, or expropriate, the form of tenure you end up with could have nothing to do with the acquisition method.”..