LETTER: SA makes farming a more difficult job

At Nampo, President Cyril Ramaphosa denounced those who took up US President Donald Trump’s offer of moving to the US, saying: “It’s a group of South Africans demonstrating that the changes and transformation that we are embarking on here, they’re not favourably disposed to it. That’s why they are running away. As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from our problems.”

Resilience, however, is a not a South African virtue, but a necessity, as the state routinely fails, or actively works against people’s success. 

One farmer described a widely shared sentiment in saying, “The government is not pro-farmer.” Farm security, the state of infrastructure and poor service provision figure prominently for farmers (and all of us), irrespective of “national group” (a very 1970s-era articulation used by the president).

For the farming economy, this has been compounded by ideological hostility — which the president has always steered away from — with the spectre of expropriation without compensation having been poised over its head for years.

More recently, race-based diktats have been ratcheted up, on water allocation and employment equity. This will make farming a more difficult occupation, potentially ruining some operations. That is evidently a price that Ramaphosa and his government are prepared to pay in pursuit of a decreed demographic outcome (among the “national groups”).

Still, the president is correct. In SA, we don’t run away from our problems. All too often, the state makes them impossible to avoid.

Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.