The Land Issue – Yet Again

On 20 December the deputy president, Paul Mashatile, addressed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa – of which he is apparently a member – on the subject of land reform.

The government, he announced, must press ahead with land expropriation in order “to redress centuries of dispossession, transform the economy and reduce inequality”. Land expropriation was a “moral, constitutional and economic imperative”. The expropriation without compensation (EWC) law, he reminded them, applied to all unused land, or any land unjustly acquired – the latter, of course, including virtually all land in his eyes. Since 1994 some 19.3 million hectares had been redistributed – but that was not enough: 72% of all privately owned land was still in white hands.

Land reform, he insisted “is not just about property. It’s about opportunity, dignity and responsibility. The soil beneath our feet must become a bridge to justice and a legacy for future generations.”

If you get the feeling that you have heard all this before, it’s because you have – many times. This sort of recitation about land is one of the great recurring themes of African nationalist oratory and the fact that Mashatile is returning to it now suggests both that he is hard up for other topics and that he trying to re-mobilise black opinion with the sort of rhetoric that worked so well in Struggle times. But the whole thing is deeply bogus.

No knowledge

First, note that almost none of the African nationalist orators who invoke these themes has any knowledge or experience of farming or land management. This includes Mashatile, a leader of the “Alexandra mafia” who has spent his entire life in the urban areas of Gauteng. He might as well be talking about plans to establish a moon base for he knows and cares as little about land as he does about that.

He is, of course, also a well-known rogue, unable to explain how he was able to buy various palatial properties. Note that all those properties are in upper-class formerly whites-only suburbs. He could have bought at least one or two farms but he was clearly not at all interested in that.

Second, note that all his arguments about land expropriation are phrased in abstract or symbolic terms. Land is a “bridge to justice”, “a legacy for future generations”, it’s about “dignity" and “opportunity”. The case for EWC is a moral one, it’s about reducing inequality, transforming the economy, and reversing “centuries of dispossession”. It involves just about everything except farming, irrigation, land reclamation, planting, and food. Those hard realities – without which land is actually worthless – are somehow beyond mention.

Third, note the conjuring trick with figures. A huge amount of land is owned by the state. This doesn’t get counted. A great deal more land lies in African communal areas in the former bantustans, most of it supporting subsistence agriculture. That too doesn’t get counted.

There are also vast acreages in the form of game reserves and nature reserves, almost all publicly owned. That doesn’t get counted either. What about the 19.3 million hectares that have been redistributed? Well, actually, almost none of that gets counted because the government won’t allow the new tenants to own the freehold, so it’s almost all not privately owned.

In fact, if one regards the land owned by the state and other public bodies as under African National Congress (ANC) control, adds in the African communal land and the land handed over to black farmers and communities, it is quite possible that well over half of all South Africa’s land is under African control.

Finally, Mashatile does not confront the fact that polls have long shown that African voters are almost completely lacking in interest in “the land issue”. Usually this is cited by 2% or less of respondents. Moreover, the land that does matter to them is land in urban or peri-urban areas because, overwhelmingly, their concern is with housing and not with agriculture.

Missing

Note that what is entirely missing is the fact that when agricultural land is handed over to black communities they almost invariably ask for the money equivalent, not the land. Despite all the rhetoric, very few Africans want to be farmers, let alone believe that owning land will somehow give them dignity or the other sorts of moral satisfaction mooted by Mashatile.

This is not stupid because – another key fact carefully omitted by Mashatile – at least 90% of the farms handed over to land reform recipients fail. A year or two down the line, and the land is just a sea of weeds, and it becomes difficult to believe that it was ever fertile and productive.

The same is true in Zimbabwe, by the way, thanks to former president Robert Mugabe’s much-celebrated “land reform”. The extraordinary result is that in Southern Africa some of the most productive farms in Africa have been turned back into barren land thanks to exactly the sort of African nationalist “land reform” that Mashatile wants more of. How does one explain this extraordinary situation?

One must start with the fact that modern farming is as complex and difficult an industry as any high-tech start-up. I remember visiting Zimbabwean farms where the farmer conversed fluently with his staff in Shona and Ndebele in between carefully monitoring on a sea of screens the futures markets in Europe and Shanghai, thus enabling him to choose which crops to plant that year. Outside, he seemed to be permanently engaged in maintaining and repairing extremely complicated irrigation equipment. And meanwhile the crops he had harvested were kept in silos whose temperature and humidity were computer-controlled. The type and use of fertilisers was another specialist area, as was the study of the different types of soil. Dealing with soil erosion was a major preoccupation, as was the maintenance of a wide range of farm machinery.

The variety of skills required of the farmer seemed almost endless. Not surprisingly, many of the farmers had studied at agricultural colleges and they also made a point of staying up to date with new developments by the careful reading of farming magazines.

Ignored

All such considerations are ignored by Mashatile, just as they were by Mugabe. The assumption is that Africans have been farming since time immemorial and that it is simply in their blood. You simply have to give them back the land and happiness and prosperity will result. Of course this is nonsense.

The most you can hope for is that such land reform recipients will scratch out a living through subsistence agriculture, tending a few scrawny cattle. More likely they will be forced to invest what little they have in their “farm” and will then go bust, thus actually increasing economic inequality. They are unable to borrow against their land in the way commercial farmers do because the government won’t allow them to own the freehold.

Even greater nonsense occurs where it is decided that a piece of land must be “restored” to some African community for, in effect, the assumption is that the community will then farm it collectively. But throughout the world the record of collective farming is abysmal.

Very quickly disputes break out over what to plant, whether to use fertilisers etc and, of course, no one in the community has any specialist farming knowledge. In no time you have another failed farm.

Now, all these things were apparent to knowledgeable farmers at the very outset of the land reform programme. Their voices were not heard, of course. The minister of agriculture in those days was Derek Hanekom and I found that real farmers laughed at the idea that he knew much about farming.

At that time, I carried out a large research project into farmer-farm worker relations in KwaZulu-Natal. We found that with few exceptions labour relations were pretty good and that worker incomes were comparable with industrial wages, once all the small benefits in kind were also factored in.

I heard Hanekom being interviewed on the radio and he was asked about this study. He said with great heat that he had not read it and that he was determined not to read it. Yet it was the only study of its kind and it contained many warnings about what would happen if the government went ahead with its planned agricultural “reforms”. So, warnings were disregarded and many farmworker jobs were lost as a result.

Disaster

Within a few years it became obvious that the land reform programme was a disaster and that the overwhelming majority of farms handed over to land reform recipients were failing. And the Land Bank itself went bankrupt. Nonetheless, the government ploughed ahead with its land reform programme.

Productive white-owned farms were taken over and soon most of them had gone bust too. The Land Bank went bankrupt for a second time. The net result was that the government had spent a great deal of money buying out white farmers and had succeeded in considerably reducing the amount of good land under cultivation.

Luckily for the government, the remaining, mostly large-scale farms and farming corporations (all of which are white-owned), managed to considerably improve their productivity, so food production held up. In practice, the two-thirds of South Africa’s population that lives in the big cities is prevented from starving by this relatively small number of white-owned latifundia. If, however, the EWC enthusiasts have their way some, or all, of these very large farms will get expropriated and large-scale starvation will quickly follow. In addition, of course, most of our agricultural exports come from those large farms, so they too would also be sharply reduced.

All of this has been known for some decades . Yet, quite clearly, politicians like Paul Mashatile have failed to pay attention. In effect, he and others like him – in the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe Party as well as the ANC – are making the same old speeches about land and land reform that their predecessors were making 10, 20, and 30 years ago.

The same appeals to “dignity”, the same empty assertions about “reducing inequality”, the same sort of jiggery-pokery about the actual figures for land ownership, the same attempt to insist that land is a moral issue. It is all dreadfully tired stuff and none of this would be happening if only people like Mashatile read anything serious about the actual results of “land reform”.

But one doubts that Mashatile does much serious reading of any sort. Like most ANC politicians he relies on oral tradition and recites the same old nonsense. Here, as elsewhere, one perceives the onward decline of ANC leadership.