THE LAND TIME BOMB IS URBAN, NOT RURAL
Is the greatest hunger for land really in the platteland? Not if you consider how people are streaming into our cities and the dejected reality that awaits
them there, writes Piet Croucamp.
Millions of South Africans flock to our cities every year, particularly in the Western Cape and Gauteng. They’re seeking employment and better schools for their children, but the infrastructure in these provinces cannot handle the additional pressure and migrants find themselves in a sociology of poverty and crime.
Apart from economic survival, unemployed migrants also need land. This ‘land hunger’ is measurable in urban areas and an obvious contributing factor in the incidence of violence and conflict. Shortcomings in the granting of land pose a fundamental threat to the viability and legitimacy of local governments.
Over the past 20 years South Africans have urbanised at a rapid rate. Approximately 64% have already bidden the platteland farewell. Normally urbanisation is a sign of a growing and progressive economy. People move to cities to gain access to prosperity, as well as to effect socioeconomic mobility.
The value of assets in growing cities increases more sustainably; the average household income is higher than in rural areas; and the complex architecture of an urban economy demands higher skills levels. Schools are better off financially and good medical services are more easily accessible. Metropoles also have a larger tax base, which means municipal services are generally better as a result. Successful democracies are dependent on a sophisticated modern, urbanised society.
Unfortunately, SA currently isn’t in a position to manage urbanisation. Metropoles – and larger municipalities – are under tremendous pressure because of bad financial management. As a result of low economic growth since 2009, the national treasury has simply laid the consequences of bad financing at the feet of local administrations. Urban development has slowed down or even come to a standstill because of the lack of capital to develop services.
The infrastructure in many cities and towns has deteriorated to such a degree that it can no longer be maintained but has to be replaced completely. Water and electricity sources are under massive pressure but the logistics of supply are under even greater pressure.
In rural areas, on the other hand, this hunger for land is largely a moral question and perhaps even an economic myth, which brings us to an interesting conversation about land and ownership.
The ruling party scores many political points by portraying to organised agriculture that land hunger in rural areas is a potential political time bomb. The supposition is that agricultural land is in short supply and that poverty can be alleviated by redistributing it on moral grounds. This moral argument can’t be contested because of SA’s history in which black people were dispossessed of their land during the process of political conflict.
The rationale behind using land as a commodity to help create employment is not an illogical one, but the costs of this approach most likely exceed the economic benefits in rural areas. Because of low economic growth and pressure on its coffers, the state does not have the necessary capital or skills to create jobs in rural areas, and the private sector that does invest in rural development really only consists of white farmers, particularly those who are already farming according to the economy of scale. Because of the process of economic modernisation, capital investment in agriculture is largely focused on mechanisation and the upgrading of skills in the current workforce, rather than on job creation.
Thus there is enormous pressure on people in rural areas to rather seek their fortune in urban areas, but our cities are currently not a source of social, welfare and economic opportunities. What’s more, true land hunger is making the political fever in cities rise in an untenable way. The EFF is taking great political advantage of the urban land shortage by simply encouraging illegal occupations.
The allocation or reallocation of rural land is therefore largely a moral question, and, in the final analysis, there is no proof that a need for farmland will result in political conflict. During the land-restitution process by the Department of Rural Development, 95% of beneficiaries chose the capital over the land. What’s more, only 5% of the farms transferred to communities previously disadvantaged by the apartheid state were relatively successful in terms of agricultural production.
Rural job creation is simply too expensive and the country too urbanised to drive land reform as a development project.
If blood is going to flow about land in South Africa, it will happen in our cities.
Dr Piet Croucamp is a political analyst and political-science lecturer at the University of Johannesburg. He also presents the programme Megaboere on kykNET.