SA’s land issue far too complex - Part II

Protest. Amabutho protest government decision to dissolve the Ingonyama Trust, which controls three million hectares of tribal land outside the Durban City Hall earlier this year. PHOTO BY GUARDIAN

What you need to know:

  • Major trouble. Experts believe there is land to be redistributed in South Africa. But doing so without due care may cause major political and economic upheaval in a country that has been steadily healing from scars of apartheid as Chris Erasmus writes.
  • Very difficult. The point here is this: legally, technically and functionally, identifying specific pieces of land for redistribution is going to be extremely difficult, open to many appeals and problems, and is likely to be seen by the international community as a collective punishment of today’s “whites” for the sins of their forbears – Ramaphosa himself has described land dispossession as SA’s “original sin”.

In South Africa, with land expropriation without compensation having been accepted in principle for land transfer to the dispossessed majority, the issue of land is now top of the political and economic agendas.
But populist sloganeering and simplistic suggestions on how to resolve the centuries-old problem of who owns what land, and on what basis, are not only unhelpful – they could, in fact, easily revive the prospects for a racial war if not carefully handled.

The reasons for this are that the land issue in SA, of almost all post-colonial societies, is perhaps more complex than any other. Meanwhile, the growing land hunger of the desperately poor is mounting and has to be addressed before it spills over into what is certain to be sectarian violence, racial confrontation and much bloodshed.
In the first part of this article yesterday, the torturous issue of who exactly owns what land was looked at.

But land by usage too is difficult to track, mostly because many municipal records differ significantly from what is actually happening on the ground.
Much intense legal contestation seems, therefore, to lie ahead around such questions and how best to answer them. Also, in some places original title deeds are no longer to be found and in others, title deeds exist but with no racial identifiers thereon.

Literally, then, no-one knows nor will ever know who, by law or tradition, these particular lands once belonged to, if anyone at all.
A further breakdown by usage illustrates the ever-deepening complexities: of 16 usage forms audited in recent years, the top eight are: government, municipality and traditional (tribal) authorities, totalling 14.831mn ha or 12.5 per cent of South Africa’s total available land area of 121.9732mn ha.
According to the SA Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) audit on land use, just more than 110mn ha is technically “agricultural”, 13.9mn ha of which is “under cultivation” (excluding forestry), with nearly 97mn ha designated as “rangeland”.

Much “rangeland” is in the former “homelands”, pseudo-independent territories run by black traditionalists under the ultimate authority of the apartheid government – and therefore, by extension and ultimate authority, is de facto state land, though still under effective control of tribal authorities who see this land as their people’s, meaning their tribal grouping’s.
Some “rangeland” and tribally authority-controlled lands are designated as farmland and some not. So the baseline figures change, depending on which measurement and by which standard one may be assessing either ownership or usage of the land.

Farms and agriculture make up just more than 37mn ha, or 30.3 per cent of the country’s total landmass, residential 3.2mn ha (3.1 per cent of total), recreation/leisure (parks etc) comprise 2.713mn ha (2.2 per cent), conservation 1.864mn ha (1.4 per cent), commercial 1.223mn ha (0.9 per cent), forestry 1.536mn ha (1.2 per cent) and “undeveloped” 2.058mn ha (1.6 per cent).
Those arguing against the need to change the constitution to allow expropriation without compensation – a move which deeply threatens the Ramaphosa government’s efforts to recover from negative investor sentiment caused by 10 years of Zuma maladministration and rampant corruption – say the government should start by “redistributing” that land directly or indirectly under its control.
To begin with, there is more than 2mn ha of undeveloped land, not all of which may be suitable for agricultural or settlement purposes, but of which some certainly is. So in theory at least, there is a good place to start.

However, also included in government-controlled land are large tracts in, for instance, KwaZulu-Natal province where a single tribal trust holds a vast swathe of this agricultural and water-rich province as permanently owned by the Zulu people as a linguistic-cultural collective.

Demeaning ‘tests’
The problem is, under the new SA constitution, there is no real way to test whether someone is “Zulu” or not – much as in apartheid-era South Africa, figuring out if someone was “white” became next to impossible, with ridiculous and dehumanising “tests”, such as whether a pencil placed in a person’s head hair would fall out or not.
Now the boot is on the other foot and people with, say, mixed Zulu and other “African” (by which is meant “black” or “ethnically indigenous”) heritage may or may not qualify for land which is held in trust for Zulus by their traditional leaders.

How and who will resolve such issues has yet to be seen.
When talk comes to “redistribution” it usually refers more narrowly to land owned by some 35,000 commercial farmers (mainly “white”) employing 650,000 people (mainly “black”).
But far more people, largely in traditional (tribal) areas, are also engaged in “agricultural” practices and use allocated land for cultivation or as animal rangeland, but who are not considered to be commercial farmers or part of the “farming community”.

Herein lies another unresolved contradiction which is bound to become a hornets’ nest of legal dispute, not least because there is already contestation within tribal authority areas over whether land allocation should be done in the traditional manner by chiefs or in accordance with SA’s modern constitutional laws.
Assuming the accuracy of land audits, “whites” own 26mn ha of the 37mn ha designated as privately-owned farm land, or 70 per cent of currently utilised commercial farmland. And this is the nub of the issue, politically speaking.

However, closer analysis shows that whites actually only own just 23 per cent of the total land designated as “agricultural” for cultivation and rangeland purposes – the latter being a broader definition of agricultural usage, including large portions of traditional lands used for grazing.
So, there is no real agreement on the numbers and areas involved, aside from the underlying historical murkiness.
Land is not merely a single tricky issue – it represents a complex of issues, sometimes clear but mostly not, and virtually impossible to untangle without fallout so severe as to threat the well-being of all, including and especially the land-repossessed.

On the other hand, there is also the undeniable truth that there was widespread historic land dispossession on racial grounds by successive white-run governments, colonial and thereafter.
And there is massive and growing land hunger among SA’s most impoverished people. Ironically, though, among the most ardent for land are the millions who are relatively newly arrived in urban centres.

What they are after is not a piece of arable land in the countryside, but somewhere to put up a liveable shelter for their family, and located as close to centres of employment and economic activity as they can get. In SA there is land to be redistributed. But doing so without due care may cause major political and economic upheaval, the “cure” for land hunger possibly proving worse than the “disease”.

On the other hand, to do nothing or move at the snail’s pace in land transformation which has happened since 1994 is to invite widespread land invasions of the sort which have already taken place at a number of sites around the country – followed, in each case, and as promised by Ramaphosa, with unpleasant and sometimes violent forced removals.
Land and who owns it, then, is a vexed and vexatious issue in South Africa – and it is not going to go away any time soon.

Land redistribution without compensation

Target. Populist firebrands such as Economic Freedom Fighter leader Julius Malema are specifically targeting the 37mn ha of “white-owned commercial farmland” land for redistribution without compensation, ostensibly to make up for race-based historical dispossession by successive colonial governments and then by the Afrikaner-led apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994.
Others are targeting any and all land, including private homes in city and town suburbs, owned by “whites”, along with any commercial or industrial ownership by this “group”.

Very difficult. The point here is this: legally, technically and functionally, identifying specific pieces of land for redistribution is going to be extremely difficult, open to many appeals and problems, and is likely to be seen by the international community as a collective punishment of today’s “whites” for the sins of their forbears – Ramaphosa himself has described land dispossession as SA’s “original sin”.

Effects. As in Zimbabwe, land may be grabbed by “the masses”, only for the country’s economy to fall into ruin, leaving the newly land-repossessed far worse off than before.