Reports this week quote Gwede Mantashe, Secretary General of the ANC, as “warning” farmers in South Africa to work with the ANC on populist policies such as forced expropriation and capping land ownership, or face a situation similar to what has characterized the agricultural sector in Zimbabwe.
This statement demonstrates a worrying lack of commitment from the ANC to upholding the Constitution. The remarks also come at a time when the real obstacle to land reform in South Africa is in fact a lack of political will in government to focus on programmes with real potential to accelerate reform.
Instead we see the ANC resorting to populist statements without dealing with the real substance of why land reform is not progressing at the pace it should, and why there is up to a 90% failure rate in terms of agricultural activity on land already transferred.
Despite Minister Gugile Nkwinti’s comments last year in Parliament’s Land Reform Committee that the Constitution will not be tampered with, Mr Mantashe’s remarks suggest that there is no firm intention by government to protect constitutionally enshrined property rights. South Africans need to know that a fair society, where opportunities and basic freedoms are preserved, is held in high regard by government.
The DA believes that the cause of land reform in South Africa can be furthered immensely through several key interventions: enabling farmworkers to become farm owners through the share-equity scheme model envisioned in the NDP; the release of state land for reform; unlocking the potential of communal land areas through tenure reform; and real support for emerging farmers at every stage of business development.
Mr Mantashe’s statements are an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere for government’s failures and serve only to undermine stability and investment in the agricultural sector.
The disaster in Zimbabwe (an economy today that is reduced to the GDP of Bloemfontein) was not the result of the rural poor spontaneously occupying land as Mantashe suggests. Instead, it was part of a carefully orchestrated campaign by the ruling party to capture state and economic resources, as well as steal elections from the opposition.
If Zimbabwe’s government respected its constitution and acted responsibly on land reform, the economic disaster in that country would easily have been prevented. The same goes for South Africa – a committed government easily possesses the legitimate power to ensure orderly and constitutional land reform. Populist statements like those of Mr Mantashe’s should therefore be seen for what they are – an admission of government’s failure to implement effective land reform programmes.
The real victims of Zimbabwe’s failed state were the rural poor and resulted in one of the biggest peacetime forced displacements in history as many citizens left the country in search of a better life while basic services collapsed and unemployment sky-rocketed.
Mr Mantashe should instead be condemning Zimbabwe’s orchestrated land seizures, not invoking their spectre in a South African context.
He should further commit his organisation to our democratic constitution, rather than using Zimbabwe as a bogeyman to obfuscate the real problem in Land Reform – the failure of the ANC in government to use the abundant resources at its disposal in the last 20 years to affect real change in this important area of redress.
The DA sees land reform as an opportunity for all South Africans to build a fair society based on freedom and opportunity – not an opportunity to ratchet up tensions as cover for government’s failings on land reform.
Thomas Walters
Shadow Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform