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A case study of land restitution - Newsroom - 24-02-2014
As several commentators have noted, any government with the track record of Jacob Zuma’s ANC should not stand a chance of re-election.
Yet, in the real world, it will be a political breakthrough if the ANC merely falls below 60% nationally, and below 50% in Gauteng.
Various analysts proffer a range of reasons for this. But most ignore a very important one, which I summarise as follows: Despite President Zuma’s dismal record, the ANC only needs to follow a simple strategy to win an election. It only has to ensure that the electorate remains divided along historical fault lines, particularly race and ethnicity. The DA has the much harder task of bringing together individuals, who identify with diverse groups, around issues of common interest. This is much tougher than it sounds, because, in all divided societies, issues relating to identity and group solidarity generally “trump†any other priority.
For this reason, political parties that represent majority groups in complex, divided societies have a massive built-in electoral advantage. All they need to do is keep old divisions alive, and they win every time. This is exactly what the National Party did under apartheid. So it makes sense that both the NNP’s former leaders, as well as the “old nationalists†now with the Freedom Front Plus are with the ANC today. They all use the same strategy of ethnic and racial mobilisation, otherwise known as “divide and ruleâ€.
The DA, on the other hand, has the monumental task of bringing people together who still often live in different realities, divided by old fault-lines, including race, ethnicity, and religion.
When the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, visited South Africa in 2010, he asked to meet me to discuss the DA’s growth, and described our success as a project of “international significanceâ€. He warned that no other party in comparable circumstances had yet managed to achieve what we had set out to do, and he was amazed by our progress. He was also optimistic that our historic endeavour had a real chance of success.
We are unshakeable in our belief that it is possible to build an open, opportunity society for all in a complex plural society, in which everyone is free to choose their own identity, is equal before the law, and where each person has the means and the opportunities to become the very best they can be.
And we also know that unless we can achieve this, South Africa’s democracy cannot succeed.
But we are also under no illusion:when the ANC faces the prospect of a serious setback at the polls, as it does now, they will mount the mother of all “divide-and-rule†campaigns, starting with the platform of Parliament.
That is the reason that so many “divide-and-rule†Bills are being rushed through Parliament and its committees before the House rises on 15 March.
Take land reform, an issue on which the ANC has lost all credibility. The three pillars of the land reform programme include redistribution, tenure security and land restitution.
If land restitution had worked, much progress would have been made in land redistribution, so these programmes cannot be clearly separated from each other.
But, what is often ignored, is that 92% of all restitution claimants have preferred to take cash pay-outs, rather than return to the land. So when critics complain about the slow rate of return to the land by dispossessed people, it is important to note that vast majority of successful claimants up till now have chosen not to.
But those who have chosen to return to take their right to land, have found the going very tough. In fact, according to the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, about 90% of such programmes have failed to keep the land productive.This simply makes poor people poorer, even though they nominally have their land back.
And there remains a serious backlog -- involving mainly complicated rural claims -- that is having devastating consequences for both the claimants, and the farmers who are unable to develop or borrow money against land on which a claim has been lodged. An investigation into the restitution process by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) found: illegal land grants to the value of at least R96.6 million, 636 examples of non-existent or false beneficiaries, forgery of valuation documents and officials’ family members listed as beneficiaries.
The reason for the failure of the restitution policy is NOT the “willing-buyer-willing-seller†principle, as the ANC falsely claims. It is the corruption, mismanagement, inefficiency and arrogance that has characterised the government’s approach up till now. And it is also due to the lack of support provided to new farmers to keep the land productive once it has been transferred.
The ANC’s failure in land reform and tenure -- in both rural and urban areas -- is even greater than the mess of the restitution process.
source: DA