LETTER: A clueless policy shift on land

You report that the ANC is considering yet another policy shift on land reform (“ANC proposes radical policy shift to work with private sector”, 25 April). If this is true then we should accept that the party is clueless.

Imagine, the whole ruling party grovelling to white farmers, some of whom never paid for the land they now claim to own. I think it is worth reminding the ANC leadership of a few historical facts that seem to escape their collective minds.

First, some of SA’s big white commercial landowners have intergenerational wealth precisely because their ancestors dispossessed Africans.

Second, the liberation struggle was about land ownership because land ownership is everything.

In his essay “The Agrarian Standard”, Wendell Berry reminds us: “How do we come at the value of a little land? We do so, following this strand of agrarian thought, by reference to the value of no land. Agrarians value land because somewhere back in the history of their consciousness is the memory of being landless... If you have no land you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life. If we remember this, we know that all economies begin to lie as soon as they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been landless know that the land is invaluable; it is worth everything. Pre-agricultural humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the animals. It is a fearful thing to be without a ‘territory’.

“Whatever the market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is worth what food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is worth what life is worth. This perception moved the settlers from the Old World into the New. Most of our ancestors came here because they knew what it was to be landless; to be landless was to be threatened by want and also by enslavement. Coming here, they bore the ancestral memory of serfdom. Under feudalism, the few who owned the land owned also, by an inescapable political logic, the people who worked the land.”

Third, It’s always been strange for me to observe that when the ruling party ascended to power in 1994, it didn’t have a written policy on land. That’s why the government has since had three “sequential policy shifts from the settlement/land acquisition grant, which provided small grants for groups of poor households (1994—1999); to the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development programme (2000—2008), which had a commercialisation focus, providing larger grants to better-off beneficiaries; and to the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy (2006 to the present)”, as reported by Hall and Cousins in Livestock and the Rangeland Commons in SA’s Land and Agrarian Reform. It is also probably why its landmark Communal Land Rights Act, No. 11 of 2004, was swiftly struck down as unconstitutional, and they’ve never bothered to revive it ever since.

Since 1994, the ANC has given too many concessions that continue to disenfranchise landless black people. A case in point: in 1993, the outgoing apartheid government gave the then summer grains co-operatives R3.2bn disguised as “drought relief”. But in fact, the money was intended for capital formation to privatise those co-operatives and to buy out indebted white farmers. This was a strategy to keep the land prices high. Otherwise, most of those farms would have been worthless. Then the ANC was forced to buy overpriced farmland as part of the government’s now defunct “willing buyer, willing seller” policy.

While the ANC’s first minister of agriculture under the government of national unity, Kraai van Niekerk, handed R3.2bn to his Afrikaner friends to transfer state assets into private property, then president Nelson Mandela’s government could afford only R2.5bn for its flagship Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP).

If none of this shows that this government is not serious about land reform, nothing else ever will.

Mpumelelo Ncwadi
Madison, Wisconsin