Apart from undoing the damage done to education by Verwoerdian policies, correcting the injustice of apartheid land engineering is the greatest challenge South Africa faces. How does one rectify a century of exclusion, confiscation, and forced removal?    

Financial compensation, applied to restitution claims, is one way. As land affairs officials have observed, however, this may not work with rural land as some communities have taken the money, spent it, and then come back and asked for the land too. Although 93% of restitution claims have been settled, the outstanding claims will be the most difficult.

Nor are these the only problems with land reform. In November last year the new director general of land affairs and former chief land claims commissioner, Tozi Gwanya, estimated in the Sunday Times that ‘close to half our land reform projects have failed’. The real question about land reform, he added, was, ‘What will happen to the land once it has been transferred?’

One reason for the shocking failure rate is that this question was not asked. The amount of land transferred was all that counted. Another reason is the attitude that farming is a piece of cake, typified in the recent remark of the agriculture minister, Lulama Xingwana: ‘We have to lure our youth back to the lands [and] show them that agriculture is not only about working in the sun and mud, but that there are more sexy options – such as making cheese, ice-cream, wine, beer, or whiskey.’
 
Also in November 2007, Gwanya acknowledged to the Farmer’s Weekly that land delivery – 4 million hectares out of a target of 25 million – had been slow, but added that the targets were too steep. ‘If we are to give another 25% of our agricultural land to the previously disadvantaged, we must ensure that they can participate in the commercial agricultural economy.’ New targets should reflect jobs created, income earned, and productivity. There was little point in dishing out land and ‘ending up with assets that are dying in the hands of the poor’.

Gwanya’s deputy, Mdu Shabane, said some beneficiaries of land reform had ended up ‘worse than before because they lack the skills and resources to unlock the potential of the soil in a profitable and sustainable manner… We will be wasting a precious resource by indiscriminately settling people on arable land simply for the sake of transformation.’  

Despite the reservations of senior officials, the Expropriation Bill currently going through Parliament shows that the government is determined to accelerate the pace of Xingwana’s promised ‘agrarian revolution’. The bill will supposedly accelerate transfers for both restitution and redistribution purposes by giving the state wider expropriation powers.

The bill serves three main objectives, only one of which is to rectify the injustice of the land acts of 1913 and 1936, which reserved most land for whites. Its second, revolutionary, objective is to satisfy those in the African National Congress and among its communist and trade union allies who are ideologically opposed to the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle and the respect for private property ownership it implies. Its third, political, objective is to create the impression that the government can remedy the hitherto largely disastrous execution of land reform. The bill is both a smokescreen to deceive the supposed beneficiaries of land reform and a means of making the free market a scapegoat for the government’s ineptitude. No proof of the failure of willing-buyer-willing-seller has been produced.    

Conceived thus largely in bad faith, the proposed legislation shows no regard for its potential impact on confidence, investment, or even food production.  

Even though there may not be many ‘sexy options,’ there will no doubt be successes.  Some will depend on the 5 000 agricultural extension officers to be trained over the next three years – though when their expertise will become available is anyone’s guess.     

For the government to reach its target of transferring 30% of white farm land to blacks by 2014 would mean doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the annual rate of transfer so far. Given the incompetence that pervades so much of government, the greater expropriation powers may not achieve this. But if it is achieved, the result will probably be even more assets dying in the hands of the poor.   

* Kane-Berman is the Chief Executive of the South African Institute of Race Relations.