Is land distribution the unsolvable problem facing country?

IN 1657, with Jan van Riebeeck’s supply station under threat of failure, nine Dutch East India Company (VOC) employees were released from their employ, given 11.4ha each – along the Liesbeek River in Cape Town (think Kirstenbosch, Newlands), tools, seeds and loans – all on condition that they sold their produce exclusively to the VOC.

Within two years, the further outward expansion of these “free burghers” – effectively South Africa’s first commercial farmers – gave rise to conflict with the Khoikhoi over cattle and led to the first of the three Khoikhoi-Dutch wars.

It also led to something far more pervasive and intractable: the land question – specifically who owns it and how it’s used within the confines of South Africa.

Inevitably it’s become linked to race and is now an increasingly popular bandstand for those seeking political influence – from EFF leader Julius Malema’s “people of South Africa, where you see beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you”, to President Jacob Zuma’s “the source of poverty, inequality, unemployment is land . . . which was taken, not bought. Stolen”, to Steve Hofmeyr’s latest tweet, “If you think whites ‘stole’ the land, you are in breach of contract with your ancestors!”.

In the media face-off contest of who can shout the loudest, there are two guidelines necessary to survive the diatribe.

First, don’t just focus on the tallest tree – take in the whole forest before you decide which branch is yours.

Second, separate out principle (how it’s intended to work) from practice (how it really works). Let’s start with the basics. In 2015, the agricultural sector contributed 2.5% of GDP, in 2014 it employed some 670 000 persons and in 2016, 2.33 million households engaged in agriculture.

South Africa is the 25th largest country (by landmass) in the world.

Our 1.22 million km² (roughly 122 million rugby fields) houses some 55 million people so, in principle, two and bit rugby fields for every South African. But in practice not all land is equal. While 80% is used for agricultural purposes, only 11% is arable.

So when Malema starts handing out the land parcels, who gets the Karoo semidesert bits and who gets the Sundays River Valley orchards? He’s a little short on that detail. A further practical inconvenience is that few want to live in the gramadoelas – 64% of our people are urbanites (cities interestingly only account for 1.5% of our land usage).

It could also be why 90% of land restitution beneficiaries take the cash and why up to 90% of land resettlement projects have failed.

Does the city guy, buying his food from Checkers and living in a second floor apartment, have any real interest in land?

Research from the SA Institute of Race Relations seems to bear this out. In a 2015 survey, only 2.2% of respondents thought more land reform was the best way to improve people’s lives, and 78% cited more jobs and better education.

Could it be that for the majority of (city-bound) South Africans, land is not as big an issue as politicians portray it to be, that our relationship to land has changed since 1657?

Which brings us back to those nine free burghers.

By 1994 they had grown to an estimated 58 000, VAT-registered commercial farming units, but by 2007 this number had dwindled to 40 000 units.

Just how many are white-owned is difficult to say, as “units” includes individuals, companies, trusts and foreign-owned enterprises.

We do know that 80% of South Africa’s landmass is in private hands and it’s common cause that the bulk of this remains white-owned.

How much exactly remains speculative, as the data doesn’t answer this question.

What many land commentators often miss, when focused on the race-land debate, is that land use is dynamic and shifting.

When Van Riebeeck arrived on our shores, land wasn’t “owned” per se.

Large areas were controlled by pastoralist tribes, kept viable by migration or nomadic movement and defended by force.

The free burghers changed that by fencing off sections, claiming title and growing crops commercially.

A further shift came in 1894 when Cecil Rhodes started racially parcelling off land through the Glen Grey Act’s policy of “one man, one plot”, ultimately culminating in the 1913/1936 Natives Land Act which entrenched racially-based ownership (93% of South Africa, at the time, being allocated to whites).

It meant the end of migratory pastoralism and the arrival of subsistence farming.

The significant current decline in commercial farming units would suggest another shift is taking place.

As happened in manufacturing, when South Africa re-entered the world markets post ‘94, our farming methodology has had to change to remain globally competitive: larger units, more mechanisation, more contract growing, fewer staff.

There’s one more big sticky practical problem facing the “give back the land” brigade, namely in 1913 the black population numbered just more than four million persons and whites 1.2 million.

Last year those numbers looked very different.

There are now 45 million blacks and 4.5 million whites.

How then do you practically return what originally belonged to four million, to a group 10 times that number?

So if agriculture is such a small contributor to GDP, if food security trumps each person having a piece of land, if the majority of the population don’t really care, if food production systems are changing and if the practicalities of restoring what was lost are practically insurmountable, why can politicians plough this field with such success? Why’s Hofmeyr so incensed about the idea of land being “stolen” and why is Zuma trying to out-Malema Malema on the issue?

My answer? Because land is symbolic and deeply ingrained in our cultural and family psyches.

Because land ownership signified, for the Afrikaner, freedom from the VOC/British oppressor and his elevation out of poverty.

Because fencing off the land signified, for the black African, the start of his oppression and poverty, and the fact that his oppressor’s descendants still own it means he remains entrapped by fences he never built.

So, a question with (at least) two seemingly irreconcilable answers that leaves us with two choices: continue the vitriol or find a way to hear each other?

Could it be that for the majority of (city-bound) South Africans, land is not as big an issue as politicians portray it to be?