The ANC wants farmers to donate land for redistribution to emerging black farmers, in a move that appears to be a radical rethink of earlier attempts to tackle SA’s land question.
The proposal, which one critic called the “privatisation of land reform”, is contained in a discussion document prepared for the party’s policy conference, scheduled for July. If adopted it would mark a U-turn for the ANC, which in 2017 said the constitution should be amended to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation.
The appeal for land donations is likely to raise eyebrows after the ANC failed in parliament to pass the constitutional amendment. It required a two-thirds majority but the EFF differed with the ANC on the expropriation method, demanding that all land be placed under state custody.
In the discussion paper, titled “Strengthening Economic Recovery and Reconstruction to Build an Inclusive Economy”, the party appears to have closed the door on any future attempts at expropriation of land without compensation, stressing instead the importance of a viable and job-creating agricultural sector.
It proposes that a land reform and agricultural development agency — an entity being set up by the department of land affairs and agriculture — be given the following tasks:
- Enabling policy and bureaucratic processes to facilitate land donations.
- Creating and managing a recognition mechanism given to farmers donating land.
- Providing financial support to beneficiary farmers.
- Developing programmes to assist new-entrant farmers with market access, to develop skills across the entire agricultural value chain.
It wants the agency to manage state-owned land earmarked for distribution, and the process of land donations.
“The Agency will therefore only record land transactions and accept land for redistribution. Most importantly, the Agency will monitor progress with land reform and, in the process, advise on partnerships between farmers and beneficiaries. It will also foster confidence in the land reform process, and this will encourage the voluntary release of land (by mines, churches, municipalities, SOEs, government departments or absentee landlords) directly to beneficiary households, communities or to the Agency.”
Experts have questioned whether the government could rely on the goodwill of landowners to effect a constitutional mandate.
Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, an expert on the land question and author of the book Land Matters: South Africa’s Failed Land Reform and the Road Ahead, called the land donation proposal a smokescreen.
“No amount of landowner-driven initiatives will resolve the crisis of land injustice,’’ he said.
The government has for decades struggled with land reform. It set the target of redistributing 30% (77-million hectares) of land within its first five years in power. That target has slowly been revised over the past 27 years, and the National Development Plan extended it to 2030.
A 2013/2014 land audit found that 79% of SA's land was in private ownership, 14% was owned by the state and 7% was unaccounted for.
With the defeat of the constitutional amendment, the ANC has vowed to use the Expropriation Bill, now before the public works portfolio committee, to effect expropriation. The bill makes provision for no compensation for expropriation of land in the public interest, but makes the courts the final arbiter in disputes between the state and owners whose land is earmarked for expropriation.
The discussion paper’s ideas on agriculture and other sectors of the economy are presented as part of “social compacting” and calls for “building society-wide consensus’’, an approach that stresses voluntary actions and sacrifice by SA’s social sectors to help grow the economy and transform society.
Ngcukaitobi said it was a mistake for the party to expect landowners to drive land policy instead of the state.
“The ANC’s primary failure in government has been to let landowners drive policy and practice of land reform. Land reform should be driven by the state and must respond to the needs of the landless. Donations by landowners do not respond to those needs, but to the whims of landowners,” he said.
He also slammed the suggestion that land donations be managed by an agency of the land affairs department, saying it pointed to a party that did not understand the lack of capacity within government. He said the records of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights and the department of land affairs had shown both to have dismally failed at land reform.
“No work has been done to rebuild the capacity of either institution to meet the challenge of land shortage for poor people,” he said.
The head of the ANC economic transformation subcommittee, Mmamoloko Kubayi, said they would not comment on an internal discussion document. She said the paper would be released later for public engagement.
Prof Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape said while there was nothing wrong with land donations in principle, relying on the goodwill of landowners would not address the urgent demand for access to land for livelihoods, homes and farming.
“Where there is landlessness and demand for land, the state must respond appropriately; including by negotiating, buying, expropriating land in the interests of equity and transformation. This is a constitutional mandate. Land donations can support this, but in no way substitute a concerted effort by the state such as we have not seen to date,” Hall said.
She described the land donations idea as akin to privatising land reform.
“While the idea of a land reform agency to co-ordinate government work has merit, the ANC appears to be proposing this merely as an administrator of voluntary land donations rather than engaging with citizens about their land needs and setting out to address them. In this sense, it comes across as the privatisation of land reform,” Hall said.
The ANC also proposes the establishment of a land reform and agricultural development fund in collaboration with the Industrial Development Corporation and the Land Bank, with the troubled state-owned bank taking full management of the fund once it has been stabilised and recapitalised.
It noted that government had over the past decade acquired 2.46-million hectares of productive farmland for distribution to beneficiaries. It said many of these farms were unproductive or producing sub-optimally as they were rented out to beneficiary farmers on short-term contracts. It proposed that the department of agriculture, land reform & rural development collaborate with agribusinesses to bring these farms into full production.
“The Agricultural Research Council has already conducted an agricultural potential and suitability assessment of all these farms. Anecdotal evidence suggests that if the recommendations are implemented, there should be a dramatic expansion of production (especially production by black farmers) in three subsectors of agriculture: grains, beef and poultry,” the ANC wrote.
The party said for this to happen, beneficiaries should be afforded land ownership through title deeds, production finance should be secured via the title deeds, and the beneficiary farmers should be helped to establish links with commercial value chains, agribusinesses and government procurement schemes.
In preparation for its national policy conference, the governing party is releasing a raft of discussion papers to be distributed to branches, regions and provinces for deliberation. The policy conference can make recommendations to the elective conference, set for December, which has the power to adopt or reject policy proposals, based on whoever wins the debate.
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