[This is from the Transvaal Agricultural Union. Jan]

The catastrophic collapse of the Zimbabwean economy brought about by its government’s land grab made world news, and has fixed a picture of what the worst this continent has to offer firmly in the minds of the international community. The honeymoon of post-independence expectations is over.

Yet most of the overseas media had great hopes for post-1994 South Africa. They believed it would somehow be different here. But the same trends so evident in the rest of the continent are starting to manifest themselves here, and the more perspicacious media have now set a tone of scathing, even combative, reporting on the new South African government’s policies.

R.W. Johnson’s recent piece on Land Reform in South Africa in the London Sunday Times is one of those no-holds-barred articles. Johnson is a South African with top liberal credentials, a Rhodes scholar who taught at England’s Oxford University. He is a prolific writer not only of articles but also of books such as his 1996 “Lauding Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election 1994”.

As time moved on, writers like Johnson and others have clearly marked South Africa’s decline. His latest book “South Africa: the First man, the Last Nation” left little doubt about where South Africa was going, and his current Times piece on land reform in this country is just as incisive, peeling back the government’s subterfuge and verbiage to expose the folly of its agricultural policies.

We present hereunder a slightly edited version of Mr. Johnson’s Sunday Times article.

Tzaneen, Limpopo Province

South Africa’s land reform process envisages that 30% of white-owned commercial farms must be transferred to black owners by 2014, that a further 20% of high potential agricultural land must be available for lease by blacks and that all remaining white farmers must give blacks at least a 25% share in their farms, with provisions for shared decision-making and the transfer of skills so that these black partners can play a progressively large role in the farms’ management.

These plans are however meeting increasing resistance from white farmers and are also compromised by the almost universal failure of the farms already handed over to black owners. Last month the Limpopo provincial government, controlled by the ruling African National Congress, had the embarrassing task of taking back 71 farms from black owners who had in the space of a few years allowed previously thriving farms to deteriorate to the point of collapse. Historically, Limpopo has produced over half of South Africa’s tomatoes and mangoes and accounted for 60% of its citrus exports, but a tour of the farms tells a tale of complete dilapidation, with vandalized houses, overgrown orchards, vineyards which have returned to bush and fruit plantations in ruins.

Similar stories are to be heard in most other provinces but Limpopo, which neighbours Zimbabwe, is a key test case: it depends more on agriculture than any other province and its few whites (2,7% of its population in 1994, down to only 1% now) have always been hard liners. It is the stronghold of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. TAU rejects the government’s plans. “What government is doing to SA’s commercial agriculture under its land “reform” policy is nothing short of culpable destruction”, says Fritz Ahrens, TAU’s leader in the Makhado area. He complains bitterly that “we are treated like second-class citizens. Africans have lodged claims on 88% of all Limpopo’s farms. In one of the meetings with government officials, I asked “where am I allowed to own land then?”, and he said “Try Australia”.”

Land Restitution

Under the government’s land restitution programme, black communities are invited to stake a claim to any land they feel was historically theirs. Since there is no downside to making such a claim, there are, inevitably, many opportunist claims but the Land Claims Commission seems determined to push the process as hard as it can.

The fourteen farms of the Letsitele Valley returned to the Mamathola community remain a terrible example of land reform. Within a short time the government grants had been used up to buy vehicles, the farms’ management committees had awarded themselves vast salaries and perks and the farms foundered in a welter of recrimination. The provincial government has now brought in “strategic partners” with a ten-year contract to put the farms back on their feet and then hand them back to the community. These strategic partners are always the same – two farming operations run by white ANC members with a raft of influential ANC politicians amongst their shareholders and directors. This group has also been called in to save the Zebediela estate, once the world’s largest citrus farm producing 400 million oranges a year.

The failed (black) community farmers are angry – they claim they didn’t receive enough government support. One survey showed that among new black farmers, only 12% believed that hard work was necessary to ensure sustainable production. But falling agricultural production has in no way blunted the government’s ideological commitment to land reform.

None of these realities feature in the government’s rhetoric about land reform in which colonialism and apartheid alone is held responsible for preventing Africans from becoming successful farmers.” His latest book “South Africa: the First Man, the Last Nation

Disasters continue

Despite the above comments by Johnson and similar ones by international observers, and the empirical evidence that the “reform” policy is a failure, more and more farms are earmarked for takeover. The government now favours “mentoring”, where white farmers are brought in to either keep the transferred farm in running order, or to resuscitate a collapsed farm. The problem with this policy is that it is a waste of time and money, and does not solve the problem of creating a black commercial farming sector. The fact that there are few in the black community who are able to sustain such a sector is ignored by the government. Farmers in Limpopo tell TAU that the white groups brought in to salvage the collapsed farms in the area, are paid by the government, and they are only harvesting, not pumping capital into the farms for a long-term future. Thus everything is short term, and the plan to hand back the farms after ten years to the same people who ruined them in the first place is an exercise in futility and ideological pretence.

Emerging farm successes lauded in the press are usually without exception managed by white mentors. Everything is given on a plate, to ensure the success of the project, but the minute these mentors leave, the project invariably collapses. Is this a logical and sane way to manage commercial agriculture in South Africa? Perhaps the government’s aim is to rid the country of the commercial farming sector, and to import food with the foreign exchange earned from the commodities boom. This is a gamble which may not pay off. History will surely be the judge.

Source: Transvaal Agricultural Union