Black and white farmers must fight for secure land tenure

The African Farmers Association of SA said last week that it supported the ANC’s position on the expropriation of land without compensation in cases where, for instance, land was unutilised.

But, it added, black farmers wanted to own their land and hold the title deed. It was strongly opposed to land reform policy as it stands, in which they are made perpetual tenants of the state.

The anger of black farmers over the title-deed issue highlights a little-known and quite astonishing fact. While one of the pillars of the Constitution for building a new society was to give those who had been denied security of tenure through past discrimination inalienable rights to property, in the past 10 years the government has quietly ditched this aspiration, replacing it with a leasehold system not that different from the tenure system for black people under apartheid.

That this very substantial policy change occurred without any public discussion or outcry or any legislative amendment is indicative of how little attention we were all paying to land reform through the Zuma years. It is also indicative of how deeply dysfunctional and ghettoised policy making was through this period. While other departments — trade and industry, small business, the Treasury— were working to promote black ownership and entrepreneurship in the economy, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform decided to kill it.

In the expropriation debate in Parliament a few weeks ago, former land-reform minister Gugile Nkwinti spoke of the policy to deprive land-reform beneficiaries as a notable achievement. “When we started the department in 2009 we checked how much land we had lost because those programmes gave title deeds to people. They said 5% had already been lost to the market because people who got land and were given title deeds then couldn’t work the land. They went for loans and they couldn’t service the loans, and what happened? The same people who owned the land took the land back. ”

Nkwinti’s solution was to make sure that no title deeds would be given away again. Therefore, no loans could be obtained and, while people remained on the land, once again they could not work it.

Even the Department of Agriculture, the only structure to which beneficiaries could turn for assistance, refused it on the grounds that this was government and not private land. Ruth Hall and Thembela Kepe, who researched the efficacy of the leasehold programme, found a farmer who was actually ordered not to repair a fence as this was stateowned land.

At first, Nkwinti’s idea was to give new farmers a threeyear lease, which, if they paid their rent, could be converted to a title deed. As few could turn a profit, rent was not paid and he increased the leasehold period to 30 years, renewable for another 20 on condition that rent was paid.

The system could still have worked as the leases would have served to provide lenders with some comfort that an income could be produced to service a loan. But, as Hall and Kepe also found in the district they researched, hardly any of the beneficiaries they interviewed got a leasehold document.

There is plenty of debate in policy circles over land reform and whether the primary target should be the poor (the approach in the Mandela era) or aspirant capitalist and commercial farmers (the Mbeki era approach). Few believe that the Zuma era, where the state hand-picked beneficiaries according to opaque criteria, allowing for patronage and political decision-making, should continue any longer.

Politically, it is significant for the current debate on land reform and expropriation that black farmers want secure property rights just as much as white farmers do. Strategically, in the bid to secure these for the future, the strongest ally of white farmers is black farmers.

THERE ARE MANY VARIED SOCIAL INTERESTS THAT WANT A SOCIETY IN WHICH PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY LAW

This is true more broadly. There are many varied social interests that want a society in which private ownership of property is protected by the law and where property remains yours to pass on to future generations. For millions of black people, the loss of private property through dispossession of urban land and housing to create townships and rural land to create ethnic homelands is within living memory. Apartheid set people back generations. They do not want to go there again.

The revival of the expropriation debate, forced on us by populists in the EFF and opportunists in the ANC, is not the arrival of the EFF’s bloodless peasant revolution. Nor is it the Armageddon the DA predicts. Parties and individuals must think about who shares an interest in property rights and make their alliances accordingly.