Land reforms in South Africa: the issues and challenges- ideology, politics and post-settlement support services

 

South Africa’s land reform programme 

As the transition from apartheid approached, there was a need to work out concrete
initiatives – the aims, modalities and methods of work - to give substance to the principles
and aspirations contained in the Charter and in various ANC policy documents. Three
main sets of perspectives on possible approaches can be identified with particular
lobbies, each with some associated publications. One sprang from the wide range of on-the-ground struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. These had been campaigns against forced
removals, land confiscations and evictions of workers and other dwellers from white-
owned farms. Activists engaged in such campaigns were among the few supporters of
the new order that had experience of land issues, and many were recruited to new roles
and institutions as they were set up in government to promote land reform. This
perspective gave emphasis to the rights of the dispossessed and urged restitution of
those rights. Second, there had also been some limited brain-storming among exile wings
of the liberation movement, but this was restricted to a small handful of interested
individuals who thrashed out policy options at a 1989 conference at Wageningen in the
Netherlands and in an ANC reading group on land and agriculture that met in Lusaka up
until 1990. This constituency did take on board socio-economic arguments for land
reform, but did not develop policy outlines, and seemed to have picked up little from
potentially relevant lessons, positive or negative, from parts of Africa where the movement
had a presence, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe.

The ANC itself (and other liberation movements) were divided between a vision of
smallholder peasant production, on the one hand, and a view that supported large-scale
and mechanised farms until their eventual conversion to collective or state farms on the
other, with the latter being preponderant. A third direction was from specialist international
actors, notably the World Bank, which underwrote a major review by a joint ANC World
Bank mission as early as 1993. The thrust of the World Bank input, then and since, has
been to push its finding from international experience that “smaller farms have
consistently higher profits and employ far more labor per hectare than large farms”.
 

Starting from this view of the economic benefits of land redistribution, rather than the
question of rights, they sought to promote land redistribution but through a ‘market-based’
approach, where the state role was restricted to assisting the sales of land by existing
white farmers, without compulsion, to prospective users.

The policy finally adopted by the new Department of Land Affairs in its 1997 White Paper
as the Settlement/Land Acquisition Grant (SLAG), resembled the market-based model
proposed by the World Bank (WB). On core questions it remained agnostic: what kinds
of farming and social relations were envisaged, and how this would be brought about?

Land redistribution merely aimed to contribute to a more diversified size structure in
agriculture where all producers would compete in a deregulated environment. That this
would entrench rather than erode inequalities – both between white and black and
between family and corporate farming enterprises – was eminently foreseeable and is
precisely what resulted. The White Paper said: ‘The purpose of the Land Redistribution
Programme is to provide the poor with land for residential and productive purposes in
order to improve their livelihoods… Land redistribution is intended to assist the urban and
rural poor, farm workers, labour tenants, as well as emergent farmers.’ Among these
broad groups of ‘the poor’ certain priority criteria were established: ‘The most critical and
desperate needs will command government’s most urgent attention. Priority will be given
to the marginalized and to the needs of women in particular.’ Alongside this policy
process, parties in the Constitutional Assembly debated whether to include a property
clause in the Constitution, and if so, what its provisions should be. Ultimately, the ANC
acceded to a property clause providing for expropriation of property subject to
compensation, while also mandating land restitution, land redistribution and land tenure
reform.14 But despite the ANC having fought for these provisions, the policy did not
promote expropriation and instead adopted the market-based and state-assisted
purchase of land proposed by the World Bank.

The initial approach to land reform combined several other features. First, it promoted
access to land for poor people only, as it was means-tested. Second, it provided a
R16,000 household grant, initially equivalent to the urban housing subsidy, with which
people could buy land. Third, while the policy focused on ‘communities’, many different
interests were to be accommodated in the policy, including 17 people wanting land for
their own use as well as those wishing to live and use their land together as community.
Yet the policy alienated almost all interest groups: the NGOs, who opposed its market-
based framework; many of the rural communities with whom they worked, who were
frustrated with slow delivery and the absence of support for them after they took
ownership of their land; the white farmers, who objected to large-scale black settlement
in the white commercial farming heartland; and black ‘emerging’ capitalist farmers, who
were excluded from the programme by its pro-poor means test and whose aspirations to

individual ownership of whole commercial farms were thwarted by its criteria and the small
grants it offered. The Land and Agriculture Policy Centre’s (LAPC) ambitious initiative
from 1994 onward to audit the demand for land had confirmed very widespread expressed
demand, with 67 percent of respondents in a national survey indicating that they wanted
access to (more) land to live on and use for production. It also showed that the vast bulk
of this demand was for small plots, with nearly half (48 percent) indicating a desire for
one hectare or less. It confirmed ‘universal and immediate’ demand for land for residential
purposes from which to supplement other incomes and to pursue ‘straddling’ livelihood
strategies – rather than the idea of full-time farmers that underpinned Tomlinson’s vision.

Many respondents aimed to use residential plots for gardening and hoped to be able to
run livestock on commonage land. Agricultural production was found to be a secondary
objective, to supplement income, rather than the primary demand among those surveyed.
DLA argued that the LAPC findings illustrated that: ‘the majority of landless people in rural
districts and dense settlements prioritise a secure residential site, services and access to
income, rather than agricultural land, even if such land were available in the locality, which
very often it is not. It was then realized that it would not be sensible to insist that allocation
of the HBNG should be conditional on the recipient physically moving to new land.
 

Further, the question arose whether poor households, who did not wish, or who are
unable, to move to new land, would be deprived of the land acquisition grant.’This
provided a research basis to justify provision of a settlement grant and exclusion of a
complementary grant for acquisition of agricultural land for farming at scale. While the
target population was yet to be determined, the single policy instrument by which all these
varied needs would be met was defined. It would take the form of a single once-off subsidy
for ‘settlement and land acquisition’ which could be used to pay for land purchase and
provision of basic needs on this land, including water, sanitation, waste disposal, internal
roads and fencing – but not housing. This was because the grant was set at a maximum
of R15 000 ‘to be consistent with the level of the existing Housing Subsidy’ and as an
alternative to it because, in the view of DLA senior managers, this was the only way to
get the land grant to be taken seriously by the Treasury. Beneficiaries would be registered
on the same national database, so that any household receiving a subsidy for land could
not also receive a housing subsidy. Rather like the target of redistributing 30 percent of

farmland in the first five years, defining the level of the grant had been arbitrary, in the
sense that it was not informed by any inherent logic. It was adopted because it was the
solution that conformed to an existing formula for state transfers and would encounter
least opposition from within the state bureaucracy.

By the end of 1995, the DLA had conceded that the redistribution of land would be
broadened to meet multiple target groups, including ‘emergent farmers’. However, this
concession did not become a reality until the lifting of the means-test in 2001. Municipal
commonage (1997) Providing poor households with access to municipal commonage
land is another way in which access to land has been redistributed, and the constitutional
requirement of ‘equitable access’ promoted. The White Paper identified the need to
redistribute existing commonage land and to expand commonages, as follows: ‘Municipal
commonage provides opportunities for land reform, primarily because it is public land
which does not need to be acquired, there is an existing institution which can manage the
land, needy residents live next door and have certain rights to this land. A reallocation of
commonage to poor residents who wish to supplement their incomes, could help address
local economic development and provide an inexpensive land reform option.’ The
problem of municipalities renting out commonage land to commercial farmers and other
wealthy land users – often at rates far below market levels, and on long-term leases –
was identified as a way in which public land was being used to entrench inequality, and
therefore as an opportunity for redistribution.

The White Paper committed government to assist municipalities to provide poor residents
with access to existing municipal commonage as well as to assist them to acquire
additional land to create new, or expand existing, commonages. A specific Grant for the
Acquisition of Land for Municipal Commonage was created for this purpose. Commonage
was a large part of land redistribution in the first decade of democracy, providing poor
people living around rural towns and villages with access to land for their livestock to
graze, and for small food gardens. Commonage projects accounted for nearly half (44%)
of all land redistributed in the period 1994-2002, while accounting for just 10% of the land
reform budget in each year. Overall, commonage may have been seen to be supporting

small-scale farmers, rather than enabling wealth accumulation by capitalist farmers, and
so did not fit with the shift first to LRAD and then to PLAS and Recap. 

Souce:

University of Pretoria 

Faculty of the Humanities

Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Land reforms in South Africa: the issues and challenges- ideology, politics and post-settlement support services
 

By:
Wisdom Mfune
 

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy (PhD) in Development Studies

February 2022

Mozambique Doing Business

2025

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