ANC’s land redistribution delusion

DEAR SIR — How typical of Neva Makgetla to blame apartheid as the root of the problem of unemployment due to a lack of self-employed and small-business entrepreneurs.

Being Marxist-trained and now employed by the Department of Trade and Industry, headed by a communist, one cannot expect the lady to understand that it is the failure of the ANC-led government to effect proper education at all levels — primary, secondary and tertiary — that is actually the cause, together with a labour policy that discourages more than the minimum of employment by small businesses.

First, they must pay relatively high wages as determined in negotiations between unions and large corporate organisations. Then they cannot hire and fire with any assurance. Then she goes on to broadbrush over the absurdities of the ANC’s land redistribution policy, blaming this also on apartheid.

That the previous regime was grossly unjust in its land-ownership policies is not contested. However, a process that hands land back to owners based on claims going back often one or two generations, with new owners who have no experience of the complexities of small-scale farming, is simply a recipe for the disaster that has unfolded.

Makgetla’s intellectual inspirers, Marx and Lenin, presided over the collectivisation of agricultural land in Soviet Russia, resulting in the deaths of 10-million people (some put the figure at nearer 20-million). Perhaps she and her superior have similar objectives with the now-stalled second round of land claims?

Makgetla correctly highlights most of the obstacles facing the new land owners but notes that they “are hard to address all at once”.

Naturally, the ANC cannot be expected to have anticipated such problems and, at the same time as launching the land distribution programme, instituted training and capitalisation facilities for them so this important portion of our national prosperity is successful.