Madness over precious land
URBAN AREAS HIT BY PROTESTERS Our most divisive issue is also the most misunderstood and incoherent.
As a young boy, I’d often take long walks in the Free State Gold Fields veld, intuitively sensitive to the energy and magnetism of the earth, of freedom and the mystery of what lay beyond the horizon. My fantasy would often expand to owning all I could see.
Those two dimensions: the nomad and the settler; the romantic and the mercenary; and the communal and the territorial, are powerful primal forces in our relationship with land, and often contradictory. They are also, for the most part, mythical, emotive and irrational. Yet they strongly influence our land discourse, plunging it into an incoherent mess. A greater, more explosive dimension is added by a wider territorial framing, embellished by the concepts of people and their homeland; tribe and territory; tradition; belonging and connection. These are strong enough to awaken the warrior in pacifists, creating a powerful drug to be peddled by populist politicians.
Our understanding and hence our whole policy approach to land transformation could be way off the mark. It has mostly been distilled into two ill-fitting themes – transfer of agricultural land and transfer of wealth. The first dominates the discourse and is perhaps the most incoherent of all, based on poor statistics and false assumptions around who owns what, and also whether agricultural land is the real issue at all among the impoverished and disadvantaged.
All empirical evidence shows differently. Most of the land invasions and unrest hasn’t been on farms, but in urban areas – people wanting homes and escaping cramped, poorly-serviced living conditions in exploding settlements. Their inability to achieve that is far more inflammable. I believe addressing that in land restitution will defuse most of the emotions far quicker than complicated farm transfers would.
It also makes much more sense in wealth distribution. More wealth is tied up in residential property than in farming or commerce and industry. It gives individuals an asset foothold and promotes economic inclusiveness. But that in turn needs a clear approach to private ownership and title. The concerns that government seems intent on expropriating land for the state, not for private ownership, may be valid. The latter would certainly be at odds with the EFF’s ‘socialist’ stance, which then implies opportunism in using individual aspirations for home ownership to enrich the state. Surprising to many perhaps, blacks own far more first homes in SA than whites.
What is useful, is to understand that state ownership (ownership by all) is equal to ownership by none. It’s also imperative to have a clear understanding that government in its various forms: national, local and SOEs, isn’t the state per se, but agents of the state. It cannot represent ‘all’ and too often acts on behalf of a few.
Our discourse on land is juvenile, irrational and behind the times. It’s anchored in falsehoods, flawed assumptions and volatile emotionalism. What madness would allow it to tear ourselves apart?