Skating on thin ice
REEDOM Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder’s views about the historic landownership dispute are naive and selective. He said in the National Assembly last week that Africans did not have a legal and historic claim to up to 40 percent of the SA land.
He used historic migration patterns to argue that some of the country’s African groups drifted away from the Bantu-speaking ethnic groups from western and central Africa.
Mulder is provoking racial conflict. He should have been sensitive about how apartheid coined and misused the linguistically innocuous word “Bantu” to derogatorily refer to blacks. The word still has a humiliating meaning. Mulder must also remember that the great land dispossession of black people happened through the Land Act of 1913 and subsequently the Groups Areas Act of 1957. The mass dispossession that accompanied these pernicious pieces of legislation resulted in Africans being dispossessed or evicted from 80 percent of the land.
The resultant effect is the current land crisis that the government is trying to address and redress through the land reform programme. Therefore, it is not about who was here first. Actually, Mulder must understand that the ANC’S Freedom Charter says SA belongs to all who live in it, irrespective of their ancestry. Notwithstanding the threat of expropriation from the ANC Youth League, the government has tried to address the land question within the confines of the law.
President Jacob Zuma is right to warn Mulder to tread carefully on this sensitive issue. If he is not careful, he will provoke the hardliners in the alliance to push for a Zimbabwean-type of land grab. They will use his argument to demonstrate that the ruling party’s lethargic land reform process is frustrated by right-wing elements such as the FF Plus. Ironically, Mulder is a deputy minister in a democratic government despite his father, Connie, being the propaganda architect of apartheid. He is expressing his inflammatory views without fear of retaliation because of a process of reconciliation that eschewed any vindictive acts against former oppressors such as his father.
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