Lawless, unilateral approach to land redistribution just a pay-later plan
OVER the past decade, my experience with so-called squatters has turned my head around.
I have been converted from one who championed “Jubilee” – the biblical return of land to its owners – into a believer in the primacy of non-racialism.
I have concluded that land grabs are only going to poison relations between the haves and the havenots. Land redistribution needs to be done. It also needs to be done without theft, invasion and hostility.
The whole point of a Year of Jubilee every 50 years was that it was locked into Hebrew culture and religion – so everyone (rich and poor) grew up knowing of its inevitability.
There is a sort of fatalism in this. If you were a business tycoon, you could buy more land and expand your fortune. But you always knew that it was coming. Because all Hebrews were one family… children of Abraham.
In our context, we are all citizens and we all vote. So, we need mechanisms like that – ways to redistribute wealth and land that do not divide us but that bind us together.
There are such models – like the Solms-Delta approach, which is succeeding because everyone on the farm becomes a co-owner, and the economies of scale of modern farming are not crumpled into inefficient smallholdings.
An even older proverb was paraphrased by Benjamin Franklin: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
To the Hebrews, it was death and Jubilee. So all reverent, God-fearing Jews went along with it because it was written into the Law of Moses.
According to research, most of those who have settled land claims since 1994 have not kept and farmed their land – but cashed out. This is the kind of “churning” that Jubilee envisaged. But neither would it allow the emergence of classes – no one could be perpetually stuck on the margins of the economy.
It should not be up to a radical political party or a political philosopher like Marx to dictate to landowners what they can keep and what they will lose – without compensation. This needs to be part of a social contract with a high level of buy-in. Not even the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution is enough. We need to find ways to eliminate dissent – to agree on mechanisms by consensus.
Surely this is why the SolmsDelta model took a whole decade to do deep research into attitudes and culture before adopting a co-ownership business model.
Another model being touted is that all taxation should end and be replaced by land rental that everyone with land must pay to the state.
This seems radical, but there are voices saying only the state can be the fair arbiter. Until one remembers the way senior government officials in Zimbabwe abused what started out as fairly sound policy.
The big problems there came with implementation. And the state is not always impartial. One has only to think of the Guptas getting a tax rebate to remember that truth!
My first-hand experience has been with tenants who thought they were clever not to return the keys to the landlord when they left. They installed squatters in the house, who continue to occupy it.
In the language of Johannesburg – where there are 115 000 such gambits (we have only one!) – the tenants became slumlords. The landlord company is contesting any right-to-occupancy (by either tenant or squatter) but we have heard all the RET rhetoric – and of course they can rapidly outnumber us, even as we try to cohabit the same farm property and to keep up our existing standards of cleanliness (like garbage removal), compliance with by-laws (control of alien invasive species) and good citizenship (closing the main gate behind you after you drive through it).
Squatters don’t care about corporate standards, no matter how much they may talk about ubuntu.
And slum lords drain all revenue away without contributing a cent in levies. They just ignore the “common cause”. Individualism prevails, and this reinforces all the stereotypes of neighbourhoods that go to ruin because they fill up with people who don’t care about rooting out lantana or parthenium plants just because the Department of Environmental Affairs has declared them to be enemies of the environment.
It is hard for me, after my personal confrontation with slum lords and squatters, to buy into any mechanism of land reform that is unlawful. Our story is one of trying to get to court, and which court has jurisdiction, and all the “Stalingrad strategies” that their attorneys can think up. It all makes me sure that a lawless, unilateral approach to land redistribution is just a pay-later plan. It will make matters worse, not better, in due course.
I believe non-racialism has a primacy that only a few parties like the DA and Cope espouse.
The Patriotic Front got its priorities right recently – saying the colour of a mayor’s skin was no reason to remove him. (There may be other, legitimate reasons to do so, but racism is not one.) Nor is it legit for people who don’t own a house to occupy it indefinitely – that is looting.
They are plundering someone else’s resources, and that only pours oil onto the fire that is already burning about inequality, unemployment and poverty. These must be addressed by legal solutions.
To sum up, while land reform is an imperative (and I invoke the Torah in saying so), there are good ways to go about it, and detrimental ways.
Some approaches will help it to speed up, while others will hinder our future as a Rainbow Nation – and those should not be adopted as the way forward.
l Stephens is executive director at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Leadership. He writes in his own capacity.