ANC won’t endorse land grab, says Mantashe
HE ANC tried to soothe farmers yesterday after a call by its youth league for the constitution to be changed to allow land to be expropriated without compensation and a warning that Zimbabwe-style land invasions loomed.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said the party wouldn’t endorse a land grab, as ANC Youth League deputy president Ronald Lamola had threatened would happen unless whites surrendered their land.
“It is not ANC policy to expropriate land without compensation, and personally I don’t think it will work,” said Mantashe, speaking after a meeting in Joburg yesterday between the ANC and commercial and emerging farmers. Mantashe said the ANC would discuss land redistribution with the youth league so that its concerns could be addressed at the ruling party’s national policy conference at the end of the month. “It will not be helpful to engage in violent polemics (with the ANCYL) in the run-up to the policy conference. The conference will address land reform in detail.”
Mantashe added that the party was discussing how to ensure food security with established and emerging farmers.
The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, among others, has singled out the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach as the biggest hindrance to achieving the land reform target of transferring 30 percent of agricultural land to black farmers by 2014. It has proposed in its Green Paper on Land Reform to create an office of a land valuer-general to determine a fair price for land acquisitions.
Lamola warned white South Africans on Tuesday that “whites must voluntarily give up their land if they don’t want to see young black people flooding their farms”.
AfriForum’s legal representative, Willie Spies, said Lamola’s comments amounted to hate speech.
“Lamola specifically referred to, among others, ‘the Van Tonders and the Van der Merwes on farms’ and warned that their safety cannot be guaranteed,” the organisation said.
Spies said AfriForum intended to lay charges against Lamola at both the Equality Court and with the police.
Youth league spokeswoman Magdalene Moonsamy said: “The call of the ANCYL, members of the ANC, the trade unions and South Africans in general for the speedy return of our land and our birthright has never, nor will it ever, require approval from unpatriotic white farmers and landowners.”
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