Land-reform issue will soon rear its head again

Cyril Ramaphosa has done well to shift land reform off the national agenda. Since the appointment of his 10-member advisory panel on land reform in September last year, the furious and potentially damaging debate around amending the constitution to allow for expropriation without compensation has largely died down.

This issue will be thrust back into the spotlight at the end of the month when the panel releases its final report to the president. If managed well, this provides an opportunity for positive and necessary policy changes, but there is the risk of it being hijacked again by narrow political interests.

The debate around land reform was always going to be contentious but it is a debate that needs to be had. Like it or not, SA’s existing land reform policy has not been effective in achieving its goals. In terms of the acquisition of land by the state, there has been partial success, but redistribution and transformation of the agricultural sector have by and large been a failure.

Part of this is the result of the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, adopted in 2006 to stop beneficiaries of land reform from selling property they acquired. Instead, land was leased to the majority of beneficiaries while the state retained ownership. The consequence was that, without title deeds, farmers were unable to raise the necessary capital to make their farms profitable. This, coupled with a lack of access to ancillary agricultural services and unrealistic time frames for farmers to turn a profit, resulted in an unacceptably high number of farms failing.

These failures are frustrating but it is encouraging — and indeed correct — that existing land-reform policy is being reexamined. Policy by its nature should be a process rather than a prescript. Good policymakers measure the actual and intended outcomes of their policies regularly in order to make adjustments when necessary.

The good news is that, behind all the noise and political positioning around land reform, the ANC has been consistent in its intentions. The December policy document does say that expropriation without compensation “should be among the key mechanisms available to government”, but this is followed by an even stronger statement that land-reform interventions “should focus on government-owned land” and “prioritise the distribution of vacant, unused and underutilised state land”.

We should not let this go unnoticed, especially in the context of cash-strapped SOEs and a growing urban-housing shortage.

The bad news is that expropriation without compensation will remain a highstakes political bargaining chip. Indeed, had Ramaphosa’s hand not been forced at the national elective conference in December 2017, I wonder if our land-reform policy would have been re-examined at all. In this case the EFF and factions within the ANC have done South Africans a massive favour by forcing us to scrutinise and improve policy that has massive potential for social redress, job creation and economic development.

There is the risk of it being hijacked by political interests