Mbeki silence on farm claim disturbing

Sapa February 01 2007
President Thabo Mbeki's silence on controversial statements by Agriculture Minister Lulu Xingwana about abuse of farm workers were both telling and disturbing, the African Christian Democratic Party said on Thursday.

"It creates the impression that Xingwana is speaking with the consent of Mr Mbeki, and that they are working in unison to act out African National Congress strategy," ACDP agriculture spokesperson Francois van Wyk said in a statement.

In the meantime, he said, South Africa was "reeling" under the effects of the brutal killings of farmers who had added enormous value to the country after 1994.

He said Xingwana's recent "exaggerated" statements about the purported widespread abuse of farm workers were nothing but opportunistic and dangerous 2009 election talk.

"It amounts to cheap politics, at the risk of endangering the lives of farm owners and their workers."

Xingwana last year claimed that violence against women and children was rife in the sector, and claimed that farmers inhumanely evicted workers.

Land body to fast-track claims

Land claims can be settled by the Land Claims Commission without ministerial approval, in order to speed up the restitution process, the commission said yesterday.

Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulama Xingwana has delegated her powers to the chief land claims commissioner and regional land claims commissioners.

This will enable the Land Commission to fast-track outstanding claims, said chief commissioner Thozamile Gwanya.

Land claims of up to a R1 million will go through Gwanya’s office, while claims of up to R50 million will be approved by regional commissioners.

“The commission commits itself that this delegation of power shall be exercised within a clearly defined policy framework, and control measures have been put in place to guard against misuse of these powers,” Gwanya said.

The commissioners will report all approved claims to the Minister monthly.

The number of claims settled in October and November is 701, involving 193 819 hectares for 20 624 households.

Development support worth R108 million has been approved for claimants who choose the return of land.

The Minister will approve land claims of higher than R100 million. All expropriations will also be approved by her.

ACDP relieved at failed farm attack

The African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) has voiced relief at the foiling of a Free State farm attack by the local farming community's intelligence structures.

"The farm attack was stopped by Free State agriculture in conjunction with the police," ACDP agriculture spokesperson Francois van Wyk said in a statement on Thursday.

A Bothaville farmer and his wife were to have been the victims of the planned farm attack.

Van Wyk said although 18 Free State farmers and their relatives were killed last year, it was encouraging that farmers' intelligence had helped to stop a further 60 farm attacks.

Condemning the recent murder of a farm manager in KwaZulu-Natal, he said the ACDP had drawn attention to a possible connection between farm attacks and "incorrect assertions" - especially true lately in the Western Cape.

Silence in communicating the true facts when these assertions were proved wrong would inevitably lead to a decline in trust in the government and Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulama Xingwana, said Van Wyk.

The ACDP urged the SA Human Rights Commission to investigate charges in this regard laid against Xingwana and to make public their findings to stop further bloodshed.

While crime against farmers were a serious problem, their murders was a worsening crisis, he said.

Land affairs faces leadership challenges

Leadership and management "challenges" have led to problems in her department, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulama Xingwana said on Wednesday.

The problems include the implementation of land-reform and restitution programmes, the administration of state land, land audits and human resource management, Xingwana said in a statement.

Capacity constraints are also affecting the ability to deliver and there is a lack of personnel to manage leases and plans at provincial level.

There are currently 1 000 vacancies in the department and only about a third of state land has been audited to date.

Xingwana said these issues came out after consultation with senior management in the department.

"With the challenges in the Deeds Office, which we are currently addressing, including an intervention to stop a possible strike action, all these demonstrate the nature of the challenges the department faces."

She said the Public Service Commission will investigate matters that require intervention and will report back on what can be done to correct the problems faced.

"On the basis of a report by the Public Service Commission, we will determine the necessary intervention to ensure that the department fulfils its mandate," Xingwana said.

Claiming 64 farms to expand cloud cuckoo land

The future of various business owners and farmers on prime agricultural land hangs in the balance after it became known that a claim for the restitution of land rights had been lodged on their properties.

An estimated 20 000ha of land comprising about 64 farms will be influenced, including areas like Rhenosterkop and Uitkyk.

According to Zithini Dlamini, senior communications officer for the regional land claims commission in Mpumalanga, the claim was lodged by Sicelo Audacious Nkosi, tribal leader of the Mpakeni Tribal Authority.

The claim, covering the areas traditionally known as Mpakeni and Mlegeni, was accepted by the Land Claims Commission as valid. The commission also says the claimants have been verified.

Dlamini indicated that the claim had already partly gazetted and some properties were in the negotiation phase, but others were awaiting the gazette amendment.

Most landowners affected were unaware of the claim.

Dlamini said a number of overlapping claims had been consolidated with the community claim. There were no competing ones. A professional valuer would be appointed soon to pro- vide a basis for price talks.

Agriculture in severe decline

SA’s Agriculture Research Council is confident agriculture can reverse its fortunes and sustain thousands of blacks the government wants to enter the sector, the state-funded body’s chief said. Agriculture has been in severe decline for several years, battered by post-apartheid liberalisation and exposure to global competition.

Shadrack Moephuli, the newly appointed CEO of the council, said recent data showing agriculture had created 147 000 jobs in the year to March, was cause for optimism.

“The agricultural sector is not declining ... the number of smallholder farms ... has actually been increasing,” he said.

“That is the area where you’ll have the biggest impact in terms of family crops ... That will have the biggest impact on the economy,” said the Moephuli, who once was with the Department of Agriculture.

South African farming shrank 6,9% in the first quarter of this year, whereas it grew at an annual rate of around 6% in the 1980s.

Its dwindling performance has raised questions about the government’s plans to encourage more blacks to take up farming — a policy it touts as an antidote to poverty and a stimulus for economic growth.

Land reform seeks to draw more blacks into agriculture to wipe out the remnants of decades of racist policies.

A tiny white minority still owns over 90% of farmland, despite government efforts to boost black ownership to 30% by 2014.

Officials have conceded that a dire shortage of skills has stalled this process, while critics have raised alarm about racing to reach targets without training new farmers to cope in a tough industry.

Analysts have warned this could threaten food production if too many unskilled farmers are left to work the land.

Moephuli said his council planned to get more involved in training staff from the Department of Land Affairs to speed up reforms as well as assist novice producers with more productive farming methods.

“The pace (of land reform) is very slow. That’s also my concern but I think what we can do as the Agricultural Research Council is provide services to the relevant government departments to assist them in providing appropriate technical advice in their planning processes,” he said.

Disastrous freeze on land sales

The proposed moratorium on the sale of land to foreigners would have a disastrous impact on property development in the country, the Institute of Estate Agents of South Africa said yesterday.

It was reacting to recommendations made by a panel of experts, chaired by Unisa academic Shadrack Gutto, which investigated the influence of foreign land ownership on property prices and land reform.

The panel’s 76-page report recommended that a moratorium be imposed with "immediate effect, as an interim measure until appropriate legislation has been promulgated".

The proposals will be put to proposals are subject to the Cabinet for approval before any legislation is considered. The proposal was first officially proposed at the National Land Summit last year before being adopted by the ANC national general council.

Land activists and government officials have said they believe that foreign interest in prime land and property has been pushing pushed prices beyond the reach of South Africans, and that it could hinder land -reform efforts.

Prominent lawyer Christine Qunta, a member of the panel, said the moratorium was an interim measure intended to prevent panic buying while legislation was drafted, should the proposals be adopted the proposals were being considered.

"The difficulty we considered is that in the interim period there might just be a situation where we witness dramatic increases in the purchase and sale of land by foreigners."

Bill Rawson of the Institute of Estate Agents said that the proposed moratorium - if implemented - would have negative impact on foreign investment and would stall golf and polo estates across the country.

This, he said, would result in job losses and financial ruin for many estate agents and property developers who have invested millions of rands in such developments. Rawson said he was "saddened" by the panel’s recommendations. He said his organisation did not believe that foreign land ownership impacted negatively on the country’s economy or government’s efforts to redistribute land.

"It was agreed that foreign land ownership can only be very small, less than 1%. To me it is such a shame that this is being recommended," he said.

The panel’s report said that there is "widespread local concern about ownership and purchase of South African assets by foreigners".

However, it said that under the current system of registration of deeds, it was "virtually impossible to ascertain the precise extent of foreign ownership and use of land in South Africa" of this.

The panel has recommended an overhaul of the property deed s registration system to ensure "compulsory disclosure" of the nationality of buyers. This would enable government to establish the extent of foreign land ownership in the country.

It also recommended that the minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs should be empowered to approve sales of land of a certain value. These would include agricultural land, land earmarked for redistribution and restitution, protected areas and development of golf estates.

Rawson said this would spell disaster for the "golfing tourism market", which he says generates millions of rands each year for the country’s economy. Rawson said foreigners buy property at the highest end of the market, which does not affect the lower market. He said the growing black middle-class - not foreigners - was pushing up property prices.

However, Qunta said there would be no retrospective action on land already owned by foreigners as the Constitution prohibited the arbitrary alienation depravation of property.

The Alliance of Land and Agrarian Movements welcomed the moratorium but cautioned that foreign land ownership was not as big a problem as the continued ownership of land by white commercial farmers, where a moratorium, it said, was needed on evictions.

Africa's next man-made famine

Africa’s next famine may be over the horizon. Like the horrific famines of Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, the famine will be man-made. The most productive agricultural lands on the continent risk being laid waste, thanks to a new land grab by the South African government. The first targets: white owners of farms and their traditionally Christian black workers.

With neighboring Zimbabwe reeling from man-made famine brought on by “President for Life” Robert Mugabe’s racially motivated land seizures, South Africa may be headed for a repeat performance, warns prominent South African farmer Philip Du Toit warns.

The new land grab is seen as a combination of continued commitment to class warfare by President Thabo Mbeki’s government, and a combination of ethnic and religious persecution of conservative Christians, both black and white, whose livelihoods depend on private commercial farms. Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela in 1999, is a longtime leader of the South African Communist Party.

Du Toit, a farmer and Pretoria-based lawyer, is in Washington to raise the alarm about a new government decree that allows the state to confiscate land from white farmers at will.

Author of a new book, The Great South African Land Scandal, Du Toit warns that the land seizures, ostensibly intended to correct racial injustice, will destroy the country’s commercial agriculture as it has in Zimbabwe if allowed to continue. “They say that they take it to give it ‘back’ to the people, but usually it remains in government hands as common property,” says Du Toit, who is trying to represent victimized farmers in court. The central government also is subverting South African blacks’ traditional chieftain system, he says, by usurping the decisionmaking authority of the local chiefs.

The new government policy, Du Toit tells Insight, will have a catastrophic effect on thousands of black families who work the farms. “They have no place else to go if the property is seized.” The government now is seizing only white-owned farms, but Du Toit says many black farmers are concerned that if the process continues the traditional tribal lands will be next. “At the moment they will not touch the tribal areas,” according to Du Toit, “they will touch only the white farms.”

Chief land-claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya denounced Du Toit, who is white, calling his new book “a piece of racist literature.” Gwanya alleged that the book would provoke violence. “In fact if this book gets out into the general populace I can see racial outbreaks developing between blacks and whites,” Gwanya said, according to the South African Press Agency.

Du Toit tells Insight the present devastating famine in Zimbabwe is a direct result of Mugabe’s confiscations of productive, white-owned farms that began in 1991.

The 1994 restitution of the Land Rights Act allowed expropriation from white farmers in South Africa, but provided legal recourse to the independent courts for those targeted for seizure. A new decree, announced early in February, eliminates any legal recourse once government officials decide to seize a farm. That is, the land is taken by fiat without appeal to the courts.

“The constitution guaranteed due process,” Du Toit says. “Now the people cannot appeal.”

Critics are likening South Africa’s new farm-confiscation policy to the land-reform policies in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which sought to correct injustices by confiscating larger farms, breaking them up, and reorganizing the workers in collectives or state-run cooperatives. Many workers received small parcels of land as their own. However, the reforms succeeded only in destroying El Salvador’s once-productive agricultural system and destroyed its export crops of rice, beans and cotton.

A quarter-century later, despite 15 years of peace and billions in international aid, tiny El Salvador is still a net importer of all three crops, and nearly one-third of its population has fled to the United States for work. This time the target is South Africa.

Farmers lose land

Expropriation notices have been issued on four pieces of land in Limpopo, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights announced.

"The notice for expropriation is our last resort following lengthy negotiations with the land owners, which to-date have yielded no results," said chief land claims commissioner Thozi Gwanya.

The expropriation notices concern four portions of the farm Turffontein 499 KR, in the Waterberg district.

On offer was R435 000 for a parcel of 21 4133 hectares; R525 000 for another of 21 4133 hectares; R300,000 for one of 23 3219 hectares; and R750 000 for a fourth of 22 2357 hectares.

The land claimants are from the Letlhakaneng Community in Bela Bela (formerly Warmbaths).

The exact manner of payment of compensation, including expropriation costs, would be determined at the point of expropriation, said commission spokeswoman Pulane Molefe.

She said Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana was empowered under the Restitution Act to issue expropriation notices restoring land rights to legitimate claimants.

The land owners had 21 days from delivery in which to respond, in writing, to the notices.

Molefe said the constitution required that compensation take into account the use of the land, acquisition history, the use of the property, market value, direct state investment and subsidy in the acquisition, capital improvements, and the purpose of expropriation.