A hunger for land

SOUTH Africa has many pressing social problems, but perhaps the most enduring, the most tangible, the most visceral, is the issue of land – and the searing multi-generational pain of dispossession that rankles to this day in so any families.

Getting the dispossessed back onto the land was a key pillar of President Nelson Mandela’s administration and has remained part of every successive government since 1994.

The first bid set a deadline of 1998 to lodge land claims. Two years ago, President Jacob Zuma signed into law the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act, which paved the way for the lodging of new land claims.

The problem is that there are still 7 851 land claims outstanding from the original 1998 deadline. A further 119 097 claims have been registered since the amended bill became law in 2014 – the vanguard of an estimated 400 000 new claims by the time the deadline for these claims expires. The second problem is that there is no budget to buy the ground to give to the recipients.

And then there are the associated issues of some claimants choosing money rather than land, others selling their land for money, which defeats the entire spirit of the law itself – or even worse, not being able to till the soil without getting the skills or the resources.

Land restitution is an extremely important endeavour that deserves far more attention than it is being given. It is not a case of buying land from one set of citizens to give to another, but rather a process whereby communities and indeed economic sectors are transformed to the enduring good of the nation as a whole.

The sad reality, in our 22nd year of democracy, is that a process which has already cost R18 billion – and could ultimately cost more than R100bn extra by the time it is concluded – has not even begun to yield the kind of results that it ought.

It’s time that a proper plan, with a proper budget and proper oversight and accountability, was put in place to make this transition a reality. Anything else is just rhetoric – and in this country, at this moment, that’s unforgivable.