Ramaphosa likens land reform to spiritual process

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa has described land reform as a spiritual process that should ensure restoration of lost property rights.

Addressing the opening of the ANC’S land summit in Boksburg yesterday, Ramaphosa said land was intimately linked to the preservation of culture and heritage.

”It is essentially a bridge between the past, the present and the future,” he said.

According to Ramaphosa, 87% of land was still in the hands of South Africa’s white minority while only 13% was made available to the black majority.

The president warned that for as long as ownership, control and management were concentrated in the hands of a few and served the interests of a few, the country would not be able to realise its potential of economic assets.

“When you return land to those who were forcibly dispossessed of their land you unlock its economic value.

“This will give practical effect to what the ANC has committed itself to, to effect radical socio-economic transformation,” he said.

While the government promised to fast-track the land reform process, advocate and author of Land is Ours, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi criticised the failures of institutions put in place to drive land reform.

“The way forward in dealing with this should be leaving the constitution alone. We should be changing institutions for land

Ngcukaitobi.

He said neither the land claims court nor the land claims commission had been a success.

“A fixation with restitution when it no longer works, has failed. We need to change the model from restitution to redistribution if we want to address land reform on a sustainable basis.”

Ngcukaitobi’s concerns were shared by Professor Ruth Hall from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Speaking at a panel discussion hosted by Stellenbosch University at the weekend, Hall said according to current estimates it would take about 178 years to settle claims.

She said the passing of the Restitution of Land Rights Act saw 63 000 land claims submitted by the deadline of 1998, a figure that had increased to 160 000 new claims when the process was reopened in 2014 for those who missed the first deadline.

“The Motlanthe high-level panel found that to settle the old claims of 1998… it will take another 35 years, and a Constitutional Court ruling has ruled that no new claims can be settled before the old ones. The estimate to settle the new claims is 143 years,” she said.

“We are sitting with restitution in an untenable situation We got to this point because of the state of the economy, people see land as the key to benefit, but the ANC and EFF mean different things with regards to expropriation.” reform,” said