By Moyiga Nduru
TZANEEN, Northern South Africa, Aug 13 2006 (IPS)

If a remark made by South Africa’s land affairs minister is to be taken at face value, the country could start expropriating white-owned farms by early next year.

“We have given six months for negotiations. If it fails, we’ll start expropriating the land,” Lulu Xingwana told journalists Aug. 11 in Polokwane – capital of the northern province of Limpopo.

“The president has given me a mandate to finish the land restitution by 2008,” she added. “Our people have waited for 12 years (since the advent of democracy in 1994). They can’t wait longer.”

Under apartheid, blacks were forced off land; government now aims to return this property to them, or provide compensation for it.

Authorities have committed themselves to reallocating 30 percent of commercial farmland to blacks by 2014. However, a 2005 study by the Centre for Development and Enterprise – a Johannesburg-based think tank – shows that between 1994 and 2004, only 4.3 percent of this land was transferred.

Xingwana’s off-the-cuff remark followed the launch of the Land Claims Commission’s annual report. To date, government has favoured a “willing seller, willing buyer” policy for addressing racial imbalances in land ownership.

The minister attributed the delays in reallocating land to a number of factors, not least lack of productivity in offices mandated to deal with the issue: “People may have been sleeping on the job or taking sick leave. I want to tell them that if they are not interested in working, we’ll get new people who can do the job.”

Persons whose land was taken during apartheid were allowed to submit claims for its restitution from 1995 to 1998. In Limpopo, 3,654 claims were lodged, of which about three-quarters have been settled.

One of the reallocated areas – Mamahlola, which includes 14 farms – was restored to the Mamahlola Communal Property Association in 2001.

“At one stage Mamahlola was at the brink of collapse,” noted Xingwana.

However, efforts by South African Farm Management (SAFM) – a local group that trains black farmers and provides them with assistance – have since managed to turn the fortunes of the property around.

“Through strategic interventions (Mamahlola) is back on track and is flourishing. We need to emulate such successful interventions and make sure that a land handover to beneficiaries should not equate to a failure,” Xingwana said.

Mamahlola now boasts lush mango and avocado trees – also producing bananas, litchis, pecans and other crops.

SAFM has seven similar projects underway elsewhere in Limpopo, and in neighbouring Mpumulanga province.

“We have invested 10 million rand (about 1.5 million dollars) in this project (Mamahlola). Altogether we have put 100 million rand (15 million dollars) in the two provinces,” Henry Wolff, SAFM business development manager, told IPS.

Now, Mamahola’s most immediate concern is water; while it obtains supplies from the Letsitele river, this watercourse cannot meet all its needs – especially during the dry season.

“We need a dam. We hope the minister will talk to her counterpart at the Department of Water Affairs to help us with a dam,” Charles Boyes, SAFM chief executive officer, said in an interview with IPS.

Concerns about land reform have been aggravated by events in Zimbabwe, where thousands of white farmers lost their properties during farm invasions that got underway in 2000 – and in a subsequent fast-track land redistribution programme.

Some fear South Africa may follow in the footsteps of its northern neighbour. Land reallocation is seen as having contributed to steep economic decline in Zimbabwe, which now suffers from triple-digit inflation, an acute shortage of basic commodities, and widespread hunger.

But, says Xingwana, “We are not driving white people from this country. They can come in as strategic partners like SAFM, providing training and other technical supports.”

“Their support can raise agricultural production to new heights,” she added. “We want to become the grain basket of SADC and Africa.”

SADC is the 14-nation Southern African Development Community.

The Centre for Development and Enterprise study also shows that agriculture plays a smaller role in South Africa’s economy than in that of Zimbabwe, and that most black South Africans do not want to farm – aspiring instead to jobs and houses.

“South Africa is no longer a predominantly rural society. The economic importance of agriculture has declined dramatically, from 23 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) in 1920, to 3.4 percent in 2002,” notes the report.

“Farming can provide a good living for a relatively small number of increasingly skilled people, but in arid, free trading South Africa, it simply cannot be a route out of poverty for millions of people.”

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