Land creating masses of jobs is a lie fed to foolish, unemployed people

Unless one wants to be disingenuous or dupe the masses, it is impossible to create quality and mass employment through farming.

You expropriate land today and the beneficiary gets it for free, tomorrow it’s worthless.

Prime agricultural land is finite and limited. There are about 40 000 white farmers in SA. By extrapolation, you can only create, liberally speaking, at most one million black farmers when you kick out all white farmers. The rest of unemployed black people, including graduates, will be workers of the new black farmers. Being a farm worker is back-breaking work for low pay.

Lazy thinkers opt for quick solutions to intractable problems. Kenya, Zambia and, more recently, Zimbabwe tried this madness. Judge for yourself – if land was the panacea, do you think Zimbabweans would leave their country in droves to come to SA?

Credit must be given to the SA government for realising the madness. Now we have prosperous black farmers who have been mentored by experienced white farmers.

Unless those who advocate this madness envisage a scenario where a farm is a place to bury your relatives, cut firewood, kill wild animals, destroy expensive farmhouses and sell irrigation pipes as scrap. Employment is created in smart, high-paying jobs, not through this nonsense of lying to unsuspecting people.

Erick Mhlanga, Thohoyandou