Land battle looming
Agri SA needs R38m war chest to fight for property rights – Pringle
IF FARMERS lose property rights, all land owners in South Africa will lose property rights, was the dire warning from the head of Agri SA’s development council, Ernest Pringle, at the Agri Eastern Cape annual congress last week. Pringle was one of the keynote speakers at the congress, on the topic: “The realities of land reform”. About 120 delegates representing farmers across the Eastern Cape attended the congress.
Pringle said there was a lot of rhetoric by politicians from the ANC and EFF about expropriating land without compensation and changing the constitution, much of it attributed to politicking leading up the election in 2019. “Don’t be too alarmed at everything said,” he said.
There are, however, real threats which could affect property rights and food security, he warned.
Top of the list is the proposed Land Valuation Bill which would give teeth to the new position of valuer-general.
“The valuer-general is the only one who determines what the state pays for ground. He has a number of powers, including being able to see your tax returns,” Pringle said.
A worrying clause in that bill is the way the government will determine net present value.
“If I have a property worth R30-million and I’m not farming on it, what value will the valuer-general put on the property?” Pringle asked.
With the formula used in the bill, the value would be half of market value.
“It’s an attempt by government to take ground at less than market value. “They think they can do it with the support of the constitution. The cleverness of it is that the valuation will be said just to be a guideline,” Pringle said.
“Every time they expropriate they will get argument and it has to go to court, which I think is unconstitutional. Market value should be a starting point and then you take deductions into account after that.”
Another issue is the Land Holdings Bill that would prevent foreigners buying land in South Africa, which countries like New Zealand already practice.
“What the government is saying is, they don’t want foreign investment,” Pringle said.
“If foreign ownership [of land in South Africa] was a problem it’s not reflected in the statistics – it comes to 0.55%.”
He said the other half of the bill was about how much property one could own, called land ceilings, as determined by the District Land Committee (DLC).
“If anyone feels threatened by the DLC they are going to start transferring property to other entities. Whenever land ceilings have been introduced, it’s been negative.”
Pringle said Agri SA spent R60 000 on an expert study into the legality of the land ceilings proposal and found the ceilings “arbitrary and therefore unconstitutional. If parliament passed it we would challenge it”.
Pringle said Agri SA had also spent R900 000 on a land audit, which “shows clearly that more land is being transferred through the market than through government. Government doesn’t acknowledge transfer through the market”.
He said organised agriculture needed to work at debunking myths like the often touted “whites own 80% of the land and blacks 13%”.
“It must come out of the vocabulary like white monopoly capital.”
Another myth is that land reform is slow and that farmers are hindering the process, he said. “Not really from our side.
“Government is acquiring land all over the country, but they’re not transferring it. We’re getting a government bloated with land and not transferring ownership.
“Gugs [rural development and land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti] himself admits that 90% of land transfers have failed.”
Agri SA had also paid attention to the recent ANC policy conference, and the irony of the ANC re-opening land claims at the same time as expressing their desire to retain food security.
Government was mooting a land tax. “We thought we were already paying a land tax,” Pringle said.
“They want an audit of unoccupied or unutilised land for immediate expropriation,” but government still had no comprehensive land audit, he said.
Pringle told farmers that they needed to build a war chest of R38-million for Agri SA to fight these issues in the courts.
“If we need to take [government] on, then we must know we can. “Government wants to bleed us dry, and they use your money to smash your organisations.
“We need to take it to the general public, to public commodities organisations and banks to support this. If you go, they go. If our property rights vanish, so do theirs. It’s a life and death struggle,” he said. “It’s time we defend ourselves.” Of the three arms of government, only the judiciary was operative, he said. With apologies to the opposition, he said the legislature was in inoperative, and the executive was inoperative because it was “too busy feathering its own nest”.
Pringle also expressed gratitude to civil society and the media for holding government to account and exposing misdeeds.