South Africa pushes land redistribution, angering white farmers

Thateus Letokho breaks into a broad smile, while hundreds around him sing and dance, as he holds aloft the deed to a farm South Africa's apartheid government forced his family and neighbors to leave in 1977. Following a decade-long struggle, Letokho and 877 members of his rural community are returning to the 1,100-hectare Rietkuil farm, 152 miles northwest of Pretoria, after the government handed it back to them in March. "I feel like flying,'' Letokho, 60, says in the Tswana language. "I want to plow corn again. I want to build a house. I can't wait to come back.''

As President Thabo Mbeki accelerates a program to return 25 million hectares to dispossessed blacks, the government has given the white farmers who occupy the land six months to negotiate sales or face expropriation. That's triggered racial tensions as growers say production may be disrupted by forced land sales that echo controversies in neighboring Zimbabwe.

"It's a very irresponsible approach,'' says Benny van Zyl, general manager of the Pretoria-based Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represent about 6,000 white farmers. "It breaks the trust of investors in the industry.''

Since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, the government has transferred 4 million hectares of land to the dispossessed, one-fifth of the target it has set to meet by 2014. Whites, who make up about 9 percent of the population, own 82 percent of agricultural land, compared with 87 percent when the target was set, according to government data. To speed up the transfer of land, South Africa in March expropriated its first farm under the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994. "If negotiations fail we must expropriate without delay,'' Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana said in a November 2006 speech.

Many white landowners say they are angry about government pressure to conclude negotiations on such a tight deadline. Francois Mouton sold Rietkuil, a dairy and grain farm, to the government in 2006 for 4 million rand ($574,874), half of what he asked for, abandoning land he had lived on for 25 years. Mouton, who bought the farm from the government for about 1 million rand in 1981, accepts that the restitution process is necessary, though he says he's bitter about not being fully compensated. "I was shocked when I learnt there was a claim on the land,'' Mouton says from his new cattle farm in Coligny, about 35 kilometers from Rietkuil. "It takes all your enthusiasm away. I thought I would die on that farm.''

The inequality of land ownership poses a threat to political stability in South Africa, says Rogier van den Brink, a World Bank economist who helped the government select its target of redistributing 30 percent of arable land by 2014. "A land problem of the magnitude of South Africa's is like an accident waiting to happen,'' Van den Brink says. "From world history, if you have an unequal distribution of this magnitude, at some point, some politician will run with it.''

The ruling African National Congress faces pressure to speed up land redistribution from its allies, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Both support former Deputy President Jacob Zuma, 65, who was in 2006 after corruption accusations. Zuma may run to replace Mbeki as ANC leader, the first step to succeeding him as president in 2009. "If we see clear camps between Zuma and the rest of the party, there will be a need by the centrists to demonstrate that they are doing enough'' on land reform, says Anne Fruehauf, a political analyst at Control Risks Group in London.

White farmers say the government's expropriation threats are creating the perception among international investors that South Africa is headed the same way as neighboring Zimbabwe. There, President Robert Mugabe began confiscating farms in 2000 to give land to poor blacks. Whites, who made up less than 1 percent of the population, owned more than 50 percent of fertile land. Mugabe's policies slashed agricultural production and plunged the economy into an eight-year recession.

"They can't chase people off the farm like in Zimbabwe,'' says Lourie Bosman, president of Pretoria-based Agri SA, South Africa's largest farming organization. "Land reform is a very emotional thing. It touches your livelihood."

Tozi Gwanya, head of the Land Restitution Commission, says any comparison to Zimbabwe is flawed. "There are lessons to be learnt from Zimbabwe,'' Gwanya says. "We must not go the route they have gone.''

Preparing to settle on his farm, Letokho still gets emotional recalling how 30 years ago his home was bulldozed by police as black farmers were moved off. "`We were so very hurt when we were removed from the land,'' he says. "I'm very grateful to be back.''

Bloomberg