Women’s Day a fitting platform to promote land reform
GIVEN the slow pace of the economic transformation of South Africa to make the economy more inclusive of black people, no opportunity is too small to reignite positive change.
This could be why the new Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Maite Nkoanamashabane, hosted a well-attended International Women’s Day celebration on Thursday night.
Her 400 guests included about 100 diplomats, several business leaders and community groups from rural communities.
Events of this nature are only as helpful as the action that follows. The people at the dinner needed to hear the minister’s voice in her first week in office, especially in the current land-expropriation-withoutcompensation atmosphere.
Diplomats are critical because they represent foreign investors, who cannot afford to panic unnecessarily when South Africa corrects its enduring apartheid injustices.
There were also representatives from industries organically linked to land, including the South African Institute of Black Property Practitioners. Big business and structures representing women in agrarian communities were there because women have always worked the land they do not own.
One of UN themes for International Women’s Day 2018 is “The Time is Now – Rural and Urban Activists Transforming Women’s Lives”. The minister aptly linked this theme to the mandate of her department, being the creation of vibrant, equitable and sustainable rural communities.
But neither the culturally savvy style of the programme director for the night, Florence Masebe, nor the potent musical performance by legendary Abigail Kubeka could stop the minister stating that land reform has failed black South Africans and must be intensified and accelerated; and kudos to her for that.
Reminding her guests that more than 80% of the South African population, read black people, own a mere 4% of the land, Minister Nkoana-mashabane asked if it was appropriate that land reform could have spent R50 billion only to deliver 4% of the land to the majority since 1994.
“The land must be returned to its rightful owners,” she said as she reassured the audience that the recent passing of a motion by our Parliament to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation was a step towards this long-overdue process of the redistribution of our land.
My lens in viewing all this is that of a third-generation farmer and a businessman. From when I was 10 years old, as I recall cleaning our family poultry farm or my parents’ butchery, land has been synonymous with the value one can derive from it.
Since those early days of my life in the mid-1980s to turning around Daybreak Farms into a responsive agribusiness, land has not been an end, but a means to true economic emancipation. As one vital factor of production, however, nothing can happen until land rights are restored to the rightful owners.
Land is dignity and one’s ability to sustain oneself.
Our over-reliance on the constitution, protecting property rights acquired unjustly and the prohibitive cost of buying land back have stalled essential development of an inclusive economy. That is key for political stability and peace.
Having been brought up by an independent woman entrepreneur, Mahlako Maponya, the urgency of what the minister is saying goes beyond rural development or land reform on a theoretical level.
It signifies the ability of black South African women to do what they do best, given the means: feed themselves, their families and communities.
Our constitution, as great as it is, has not been tested in its ability to bring about justice to black people dispossessed of their land.
The recent motion to implement the expropriation of land without compensation, where necessary, takes us closer to finding out just how much political will there is out there to forge a better economic destiny for our people.
The minister articulated it more decisively at the dinner: let us work towards true gender equality; let us eradicate poverty, not alleviate it; let us make inequality history.
Land reform is only the beginning. My experience in establishing and running businesses anchored on land rights, agriculture and property, taught me that owning land is not sufficient to make your business successful. There are other subtle obstacles to navigate.
These include the inability of black farmers to acquire appropriate technology to produce efficiently. Efficiency in production makes one cost-competitive.
The recent dumping of Brazilian chickens and mechanically deboned meat on our shores, which led to the listeriosis outbreak, is a case in point.
Besides being cost-competitive, those dumping agricultural produce on us have not only their low production costs to thank for their success. They are the beneficiaries of the indecision of our government to protect local farmers and the racial divide of the business community in South Africa.
White and black businesses can do much better to collaborate to eliminate the persistent marginalisation of black businesses. State-owned enterprises, including development finance institutions, must afford black business the same level of respect they give white business.
So for her to succeed in breathing new life into the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, to promote sustainable livelihoods for black South Africans – especially women – Nkoana-mashabane must do more.
She should strategically work with fellow cabinet members to create a dispensation that prioritises authentic black participation: from government procurement to policy reform and building strategic partnerships with business to advance black participation.
The answers are there among and in all of us, if we are willing to work together. As for the expropriation of land without compensation and the minister’s intensification of agrarian reform, it is our responsibility as leaders of our respective constituencies not to panic, but to display a willingness to hear each other on the elimination of unjust land rights. It is a win-win proposition.
Maponya is an entrepreneur, a farmer and a nephew of Dr Richard Maponya.