State denies offering to sell farm in Limpopo to tenant
Provincial agriculture department did not have mandate to offer land to farmer, court told
The government has denied offering to sell a black Limpopo farmer the land he has been leasing from it for three decades and has responded to his court action to force it to make good on its alleged promises.
It opted to offer him another 30-year lease instead.
While the department of land reform & rural development admits that the head of the Limpopo department of agriculture offered to sell David Rakgase the farm he had been leasing from the state since the late 1990s, it says the head “was not authorised to do so”.
In fact, the department insists that none of the government bodies that signed off on Rakgase buying the land had the authority to make such offers, or agree to them.
Rakgase, a 77-year-old widower, farms cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and game in Northam, Limpopo, on the 3,079ha Nooitgedacht farm he has been working for the past 27 years.
He claims the government offered to sell him the farm, which was a training ground for young black emerging farmers, in 2002, under the discontinued land redistribution for agricultural development programme which was intended to help black farmers to acquire land.
Rakgase has turned to the high court in Pretoria to compel the department to sell him the land at the R1.2m asking price he agreed to 17 years ago and has provided the court with multiple state agreements that the land be sold to him.
His case is potentially precedent-setting and effectively puts in question the government’s land reform programme, which was heavily criticised by former president Kgalema Motlanthe’s high-level panel report.
It has taken more than a year for the department to respond to Rakgase’s application.
The department’s acting director-general, Rendani Sadiki, states in court papers that there was never any decision by her department to sell Rakgase the farm he is now fighting for. “No legitimate expectation exists or is created by [the department] to support an offer to sell the property [to Rakgase],” she states.
According to Sadiki, while the farm does belong to the “national government”, her department is “not in fact or in law able to receive, consider or decide on an application by [Rakgase and his son] to purchase the property”. This, she suggests, is because the state land lease and disposal policy, in which the government buys land and then offers long leases to farmers, has been in effect since 2013.
She also denies Rakgase’s evidence that there are other farmers like him who have been left in legal limbo by the state’s failure to act on its promises to sell them land under the department’s land programme.
RAKGASE HAS PROVIDED THE COURT WITH MULTIPLE STATE AGREEMENTS THAT THE LAND BE SOLD TO HIM