By Tinashe Zvakasikwa.
Johannesburg, South Africa. (News of the South) – Gugile Nkwinti, the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform has announced that South Africa’s government is actually planning to take away white owned farms and redistribute them to blacks, a move which Zimbabweans are familiar with as the land resettlement program.
The party has said it will speed up the process with a bill going through parliament allowing the state to seize land without the owner’s consent, a move which will obviously upset a status cue where land was/is predominantly in white hands two decades after the end of apartheid. President Jacob Zuma is still expected to sign the Bill into law soon.
Nkwinti said that the process needs to be accelerated, to rectify past wrongs and provide opportunities to the previously excluded, a move which is undoubtedly inspired by the local elections set for August and aims at garnering support for the South African ruling African National Congress (ANC), “In South Africa you have a concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few people. That is something we have to correct,”
Concerned economists and farmers who spoke to News Of The South said that the move could have devastating implications on production and investments. They said that this is not what South Africa needs at a time when the country is battling with a major drought.
One farmer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “This is bound to insight not only violence but investor pullout and poor production. People will run for the land just for ownership and not production. This is the same predicament that Zimbabwe ran into. Now they import almost everything because the guys who took the land are sitting on it.”
Although South Africa government says that the redistribution process is not going to be like Zimbabwe’s encounter, the claim is hard to maintain as the circumstances are just too similar. More so, 30 years ago, government passed a law to prohibit the subdivision of land because farms were becoming too small. This law is still active making it more difficult and likely to raise eyebrows.
Several black communities had land claims on the 2-million hectare Kruger Park because they were removed after the Native Land Act of 1913, which consigned South Africa’s black majority to 13 percent of the country’s territory. Recent research by land activists showed that in 1994, due to colonial dispossession and apartheid, 87 percent of South African land was owned by whites and only 13 percent by blacks.
By 2012, post-apartheid land reform had seen the transfer of 7.95 million hectares, the equivalent of 7.5 percent of formerly white-owned land, to blacks.
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