Why South Africa must address the land issue

travelled from apartheid to majority rule.
While the dismantling of apartheid was a cause for celebration the world over, particularly in Africa, the subsequent years of the rainbow nation have been met with mixed feelings.
The feeling among many in South Africa is that of betrayal by the new ruling elite who seem so obsessed with maintaining the economic status quo while relegating to the sidelines major empowerment policy measures meant to address apartheid disparities.
On the continent, the hope by other African countries of an emerging economic African superpower have also been dashed as the new ANC leaders have tended to focus outwardly and see no tangible benefits in cementing economic ties with continental colleagues.
The sentiments among many are that the succeeding ANC governments have done very little in addressing the historical imbalances created by the racist apartheid regimes. Instead, they have concentrated more on a euphemistical path of nation building, which in real sense is nothing but an attempt to appease the erstwhile oppressors that their hold on the economic fabric is not under threat.
While former president Thabo Mbeki, in a small measure, tried to highlight the racist economic disparities between blacks and whites, his alleged intellectual aloofness drew him away from the same masses whose unfulfilled promises he sought to address.
In analysing the pitfalls of the rainbow nation, a comparison with Zimbabwe is inevitable.
While it is given that the South African economy is a colossus compared to Zimbabwe, it is also true that the majority in Zimbabwe unlike their counterparts in South Africa can claim to be the masters of their economy given the various mass empowerment programmes that President Mugabe continues to enunciate and implement particularly in areas of land reform and mining.
There are certain sections of people within and outside South Africa who fervently peddle the notion that land was not a major grievance in the fight for the liberation of that country. Yet when tracing the history of the ANC, it is littered with tremendous efforts made to address the issue and if the current leadership had pursued those efforts, a myriad of social, economic and political problems confronting South Africa could have been remedied.
Thus writing in the February issue of the New African magazine Dr Motsoko Pheko under the title; How the ANC betrayed its founding principles, eloquently highlights how on 20 July 1914, the leaders of the newly formed ANC, armed with the mandate from the kings and African people of the country, went to England to present a petition to King George V, protesting land dispossession of the African people.
In part, their petition read that Africans “loved their country with a most intense love . . . that their land had been taken away from them, their military and other institutions brought to nought.”
The petition demanded that “the natives be put into possession of land in proportion to their numbers and on the same conditions as the white race.”
While the trip to England yielded nothing, it sure generated a lot of sympathy worldwide including some whites in South Africa where Jan Smuts (a former apartheid prime minister) was quoted as having said: “The mistake we made in South Africa in the past was our failure in reserving sufficient land for the future of natives and the problem we have in our hands is one of the most difficult.”
Dr Pheko further states that in 1955, a section of the 1912 ANC leadership was captured by a section of the white ruling class. Despite the background of the Union of South Africa Act 1909 and the Native Land Act 1913, in 1955 the authors of the preamble of the ANC’s Freedom Charter proclaimed: “We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white . . . and therefore, we hope the people of South Africa black and white together, equals, countrymen and brothers adopt the Charter.”
However, Dr Pheko says 57 years after this declaration there are two “nations” in South Africa. One, he says is rich and white and minority, the other is extremely poor and African and majority (80 percent).
Indeed, 17 years after the attainment of majority rule what are the impediments that litter the path of equitable land distribution in South Africa?
Is the issue about a lethargic government that has embraced a too cautious approach of willing buyer willing seller that has yielded nothing tangible?
Is the issue of land a peripheral issue given the dehumanisation inflicted on the South African populace which feels no emotional attachment to their land of birth and would rather stay as squatters in Johannesburg or other such cities?
The answer to these questions lies partly in the manner in which South Africa attained its independence and how the ANC lost its cause when it adopted a neo-liberal approach to the issue of land. As articulated by General Sebastian Mabote, the chief commander of the Mozambican Army to the then President Samora Machel on why his country decided to support Zimbabwe freedom fighters in Rhodesia instead of the ANC: “The Zimbabwe guerillas are fighting for self-determination, independence and liberty. In South Africa, the ANC is carrying on a fight for civil rights and not an armed struggle for national liberation.” (Sowetan, 10 March, 1984).
Therein lie the problem with the ANC and in the words of Dr Pheko the 1955 ANC became a civil rights movement and in 1994 it negotiated “democracy” and not equitable redistribution of land and resources according to population numbers.
Is it morally right for the ANC government to have moved swiftly in enacting laws that are of no concern and benefit to the majority dispossessed black people of South Africa such as laws on same sex marriages, abortion “on demand” and on prostitutes now called sex workers instead of addressing the land issue and other such economic disparities?
Even The Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru alluded to this crass dereliction on the part of ANC in his previous installment when he writes: “In the case of ANC, it is taking a very worrisome form of over-concessions to a neo-liberal ethos in a way that is threatening the very soul of the Freedom Charter.
“Today, the ANC faces an existential debate not so much from contradictions similar to those faced by MPLA, Frelimo, Zanu-PF or Swapo, but from how it has more than accommodated white South Africa and international capital in a land crying out for retributive justice, crying out for a bit of levelling. It’s coming across as if the ANC has deserted the Freedom Charter.”
But is it too late for the ANC to regain its consciousness and revert to the founding principles of 1912. I think it is never too late but the more the issue is delayed the more complex and intricate it will become for the ANC.
It is the lethargic attitude by the ANC that has given birth to racist statements by Boers like in the case of deputy agriculture minister Pieter Mulder who recently told parliament that blacks, barred from white areas under apartheid, had no right to 40 percent of land as they historically had not lived in South Africa’s western regions.
“There is sufficient proof that there were no Bantu-speaking people in the Western Cape and northwestern Cape,” Mulder is quoted by AFP. South African president Jacob Zuma moved quickly to warn Mulder to desist from provoking emotions over the country’s skewed land ownership. Zuma said it was not helpful for the government to be emotional about the land issue.
“It is extremely sensitive and to the majority of people in this country it is a matter of life and death,” President Zuma said. If the matter is that of life and death why then has the ANC government not addressed it? Has the issue been buried by the miracle “rainbow nation?”
Why is the ANC government spending billions of rands buying land for blacks from whites at exploitative and inflated prices without resolving at once the land question? It is with no doubt that the demand made by the 1912 ANC leadership “that the Africans must be put into possession of land according to their numbers,” has not been met.
The primary demand of the African national liberation struggle is yet to be fulfilled and section 25 of the “New South Africa” constitution is the same thing as the Native Land Act of 1913. For how long should the South African government continue dithering on the issue?