CAPE TOWN // Confiscating land without compensation is an idea gaining traction in South Africa, which could lead to Zimbabwe-style food shortages and economic chaos.
It could also affect exports of produce to the UAE. By 2011, South Africa was the 13th largest supplier of food to the Emirates, according to South African government figures, and this is likely to have grown with bilateral trade having more than doubled since then to 27 billion rand (Dh7.52bn) in 2015, according to the government. On a trade visit in May last year, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry urged the public and private sectors to support the growth of UAE investments in the South African market.
According to the UAE Embassy in Pretoria, the Emirates has invested more than 1bn rand in South Africa’s property, business services, transport and agricultural warehousing and storage sectors.
But that trade relationship could be at risk as the embattled president Jacob Zuma fights waning popularity and the country struggles with about 35 per cent unemployment. Far left parties are frequently calling for the outright confiscation of land from whites – farmers in particular. Mr Zuma’s musing on the topic has added a new layer of unease to an agricultural sector currently battling a drawn out drought.
“First we must undertake a pre-colonial audit of land ownership, use and occupation patterns,” he said in Cape Town this month, according to News24, the country’s largest digital media organisation. “Once the audit has been completed, a single law should be developed to address the issue of land restitution without compensation.”
The Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill became law in 2014 and reopened a claims process that ended in 1998. It gave people who were forcibly moved from their land five years to lodge new claims. If claimants are successful, they are given the option of getting their land back or receiving financial compensation. More than 5,000 claims were lodged in the first month.
However, the process is fraught with problems. Some experts argue that there is a lack of capital to sustain farms under new ownership.
The system is also is very slow, dogged by inefficiency. Communities complain they are still waiting for their land claims to be processed years after they were lodged. Meanwhile, farmers who say they are willing to sell claim they are being ignored by the authorities. Where communities have got their land back, few have managed to return it to production because of poor management, lack of skills and infighting.
Any South African politician wanting to seize land without compensation would have to get past ironclad constitutional protection for private property. This safeguard is what Mr Zuma is suggesting must be changed.
“Zuma’s statement is very, very confusing, and it’s also very worrying,” says Annelize Crosby, who sits in on parliamentary hearings for AgriSA, the country’s largest farming representative organisation.
Divisions have arisen in the ruling ANC party after it this month rejected the far left Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) motion to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation. Both sides claim to be following ANC policy.
Mr Zuma had suggested that “black parties” should have united to pass the motion. In a February speech, he suggested that expropriation without compensation is constitutionally acceptable. “How are we going to achieve all the goals … to enable faster land reform, including land expropriation without compensation, as provided for in the constitution?” he said.
His comments went directly against those of the ANC caucus in parliament. “The ANC does not agree with any notion of the country expropriating land without compensation,” said the ANC chief whip’s office after the debate on the EFF motion.
On Monday, the ANC released policy discussion documents that showed it now proposes that the government do away with paying “premium” prices when purchasing land for reform and proposes “just and equitable” compensation.
In the countryside, years of drought, and uncertainty over their security, has been driving people out of the farming industry and hurting investment.
“Farming is a capital intensive business and many are cutting back on investing because of all this talk of land seizures. Eventually, lack of capital investment will cause those farms to die,” Ms Crosby says.
Should South Africa tumble down the same road as Zimbabwe, the result could be disastrous for farmers and the agri industry in general.
“The ‘land issue’ in Zimbabwe is the elephant in the room and it remains a tragic fact that … not only have the dispossessed farmers not been compensated but the very people who grabbed the land remain unable to produce 80 per cent of the food we eat,” Cathy Buckle, who lives in Zimbabwe, tells News24.
The number of South African commercial farmers has declined from around 66,000 in 1990 to about 35,000 today. This is partly attributable to a worldwide trend towards larger farms that has led to commercial operations expand by acquiring smaller rivals.
However, the difficult operating environment is also a factor. Many of South Africa’s commercial farms remain family run, Ms Crosby says. Altogether, farming produced goods worth about 250bn rand a year and paid out 16bn rand in salaries, says AgriSA. Farmers, however, have had an especially tough time. The past few years have seen the worst drought in more than 30 years leaving many farmers heavily in debt. As a result, 18 million people across the southern Africa region have needed emergency aid, AgriSA figures show.
Farmers also complain that talk of forced evictions only makes them more vulnerable to violent attacks. Police statistics show 345 attacks in 2016, leaving 70 dead. Research has shown these attacks are overwhelmingly crime related, but this has not removed the suspicion among many rural white communities that they are being targeted by politically motivated aggressors.
“The government can’t openly wage war on us, so they use these methods [farm attacks] to try drive us from the land we acquired legally, through internationally recognised methods,” says Andries Breytenbach, the chairman of the Boere-Afrikanervolksraad, an Afrikaner nationalist organisation in South Africa.
Mr Breytenbach says Mr Zuma’s comments on land confiscation are the culmination of years of pressure to get whites off the land. “If he goes ahead and tries to confiscate our land we will see it as a declaration of war,” he adds.
The unhappiness over restitution has been taken up by far left parties such as the EFF as a rallying cry for their members.
“We all know that the Dutch gangsters arrived here and took our land by force,” the EFF leader Julius Malema said in parliament last month. “The struggle has since been about the return of the land into the hands of its rightful owners.”
Black people, Mr Malema said, should give up waiting for the government to act and do so themselves. “People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,” he said.
While Mr Breytenbach may be prepared to fight, many people who feel targeted will probably just leave.
In Dubai, a firm called Arton Capital that helps people to relocate to other countries to acquire new citizenship, says it has seen a big increase in enquiries from South Africans.
“For about 18 months we had virtually no interest from South Africans, but the past quarter we had a 400 per cent jump in enquiries,” says John Hanafin, the chief executive of Arton. “The reason they give is the same – ‘It’s the government.’”
Arton has now opened an office in Cape Town and is planning one for Johannesburg. It is not just whites who want to relocate. “We are also getting queries from black South Africans,” Mr Hanafin says.
“Whatever their race it usually comes down to security of the next generation. They want their children to have the option of a safe life.”
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