THE LIE OF THE LAND

State neglect and elite capture are the real face of land reform, according to a landmark field study of farms in the Eastern Cape. And though many state officials have visited the area to see the problems at first hand, almost nothing has been done to fix them.

The chief finding of the three-year field study by University of the Western Cape (UWC) and Rhodes University researchers is that poor families and communities who have accessed state land are being left with insecure tenure and livelihoods while established agribusiness is cashing in.

This makes a mockery of the state’s avowed intent of using land reform to address poverty.

“Though the land question has become prominent in the rhetoric of political parties, none of them attend to the urgent challenges that are evident,” says one of the researchers, Prof Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land & Agrarian Studies at UWC. “The contrast between what land reform was meant to produce and what we see on the ground is absolutely shocking.”

Having engaged over several years with government, from district officials to rural development & land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti, and with parliamentarians in the national assembly and Eastern Cape legislature, the researchers, Hall and Prof Thembela Kepe, who represents the universities of Toronto and Rhodes, have come away empty-handed.

Refused access by Nkwinti’s department to data to broaden their study to other provinces, the researchers have gone public. In the academic journal, Review of African Political Economy, they summarise what they found at 11 randomly selected farm projects in the Eastern Cape.

Their study was conducted at the request of the portfolio committee on agriculture in the Eastern Cape legislature. The researchers say it is the only publicly available information in SA on the actual state of land redistribution under state leasehold.

Much of the confusion the researchers found in the field stems from policy changes not communicated down the chain. The criticism that the pace of land reform is slow doesn’t come close to appreciating the full extent of the crisis. The policy is failing the poor and creating a time bomb of anger, research has shown

Not everyone realises that, after 2011, there was a shift away from state-assisted land purchase and transfer of title to beneficiaries (the model adopted by the ANC in 1997), to one in which the state buys land for redistribution to beneficiaries under leases but does not transfer ownership.

In a further twist, in 2013 Nkwinti’s state land lease & disposal policy made it explicit that small-scale and subsistence farmers may not become land owners but must remain tenants of the state. Only medium- to large-scale farmers have the option to buy farms, but only after having leased the land for 30 to 50 years.

The rent payable to the state is meant to be 5% of any profits generated, but in many cases officials refuse to sign leases with farm-worker tenants on the assumption that they will not be able to afford rent. Instead they allow them to stay and watch over the land on the basis of “caretakership” agreements that lapse after three months.

Though land policy promises that farm tenants should be able to upgrade their tenure, their rights are being downgraded to those of informal caretakers — a polite term for squatters. They stay on as glorified security guards in the belief that it is just a matter of time before the farms are given to them.

“This unpublicised policy about-turn suggests political risk in the future as large numbers of people around the country discover that their expectations of gaining ownership of the land they now occupy will not be met,” conclude the researchers.

Some, like the 32 families on the 448 ha Nangkoos farm, which the state bought in 2009 near the small coastal town of Alexandria, barely subsist, abandoned without employment or farming support. By July 2016, they still did not have a lease or documented tenure rights, though they still believed they would one day become the owners of the farm.

“We cannot invest here when it is not

What it means: Land reform is failing to achieve tenure security or poverty reduction; not even small black businesses seem to be benefiting