SOUTH AFRICA will miss its 2014 deadline to transfer almost one-third of all agricultural land to black farmers, land reform officials have said.
The department of rural development and land reform has conceded that 15 years into democracy only 5 per cent of the agricultural land it wanted to transfer to the black majority had been successfully acquired from white farmers.
Bureaucratic delays, corruption and the high prices sought by farmers willing to sell have been blamed for the failure of government to meet its 30 per cent land redistribution target.
One of the ANC’s main demands during the liberation struggle was the more equitable distribution of land between South Africa’s ethnic groups.
At the end of apartheid in 1994, almost 90 per cent of all land was owned by white people, even though they made up less than 10 per cent of the population.
In addition, the land owned by indigenous Africans was of poor quality and predominately located in tribal homelands, which were created by the apartheid regime to segregate blacks from whites.
Addressing parliament’s appropriations committee recently, the department’s director general, Thozi Gwanya, indicated that poor black farmers would probably have to wait until 2025 before the land redistribution goals were met.
“The target date cannot be 2014 because of these fiscal constraints. We are raising the question of raising the targets probably to 2025 to allow for these financial challenges. We are not shifting the goal of 30 [per cent land redistribution],” he said last month.
According to Mr Gwanya, five million hectares have been distributed since 1994 and the government will need more than €6.5 billion to buy the 20 million hectares needed to meet its target.
Briefing the media, deputy land reform minister Dr Joe Phaahla said: “As government, we have to express our deep concern with regards to the escalating land prices. It is interesting to note that land prices skyrocket as soon as government is the interested buyer. It is a view that we share with AgriSA [the main commercial farmers’ union] that there is collusion in the land market. This is not only confined to land owners, but includes estate agents, valuers, land owners and corrupt government officials.”
The failure of the government to meet its 2014 deadline has prompted unions to call for an increase in taxes on the rich as a means to meet the programme’s funding shortfall.
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) spokesman Patrick Craven told reporters that a failure to redistribute land could have disastrous consequences.
“An entire generation would have passed before we see this being implemented and that isn’t good enough . . . We’re sitting on a social time bomb,” he said, adding that ongoing service delivery protests in the townships served as a warning of what may lie in wait if land reform did not happen.
“Those are linked to the land question. The fact that people are forced to move into cities to squatter camps . . . creates those kind of tensions.”