South Africa to take tougher stance on land restitution

The South African government plans to adopt tougher measures in its land restitution programme, according to indications by land affairs minister Lulu Xingwana. She said the state had to take back some of the land that belonged to the privileged and provide it to the dispossessed.

She said her department's holding of land was only 5 percent of the state assets - not nearly enough to meet the needs and requirements of most of the population. The government still had a target of providing 30 percent of land to black people by 2014, she said. "We have to take some of the land that belongs to the privileged group that have had land through dispossession since 1652 in South Africa," she said. "The impression that we had endless or vast tracts of state land that can address the needs of the landless is not true."

Last September, Xingwana said the total land surface in South Africa was 122 million hectares, of which 82 million hectares was agricultural land, 24 million hectares state land and 16 million hectares other land, such as cities, rocks, rivers and dams. She said that most of the state land was encumbered and therefore was not available for redistribution.

Xingwana said, "About 12 million hectares of this is under communal ownership in the ex-Bantustan areas; 5 million is under conservation and biodiversity, both nationally and in the provinces; 5.8 million is held by other state departments, such as forestry, education, health, defence and the South African Police Service.

"Only 1.2 million hectares, under the South African Development Trust [SADT], is available for redistribution purposes. So we have redistributed no less than 776 000 hectares of that SADT land. Clearly, state land is not adequate to address the skewed ownership of land in the country."

This week (June 24) Xingwana handed over the largest parcel of land in South Africa's land restitution process, with a value of R1.1 billion, to four communities in Malelane, Mpumalanga.

Xingwana said that to deal with the unnecessary delays caused by land owners who refused to co-operate with the government on land reform, the state would now negotiate for only six months. If no agreement was reached within that period, an expropriation would be implemented. Ninety-three percent of land restitution claims had been settled by the end of the last financial year, and in only one case so far had such an expropriation been completed.

In May, Xingwana told parliament in her budget vote speech that in the last financial year, the number of rural claims settled by the national land commission had increased from 71,645 to 74,417 of the total 79,696 claims lodged.

The commission has to finalise all outstanding claims by no later than March next year, as directed by President Thabo Mbeki in his state of the nation address last year.

The commission still has to settle 5,279 outstanding rural claims.

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