The Department of Land Affairs’ land reform budget has increased eightfold from about R500 million to R4,2 billion from 2000/01 to 2006/07 – mostly for buying land.
But its ability to spend its budget has steadily deteriorated. his year underspending in the Department of Land Affairs is expected to reach a whopping R1,5 billion. This represents almost a third of its total allocation of R4,8 billion, R600 million more than was underspent last year and R400 million more than was expected when last year’s mid-term budget estimate was released in October. The bulk of projected underspending (R1,36 billion) will come from the restitution programme. reasury officials blamed underspending in the past two years on the fact that until 2004 most land claims settled were urban. The remaining rural claims are lodged by communities often scattered throughout the country. administrative difficulties of consolidating fragmented information are compounded by rivalries between factions within claimant communities, traditional leadership squabbles, and overlapping claims from outside groups.
The increasing realisation that productive farms or lucrative tourism ventures will collapse if land is handed over without proper forward planning has also held back many of the larger land claims, including the multibillion-rand Magoebaskloof claim in Limpopo. Negotiations with landowners resisting sale for sentimental or ideological reasons have held up sales for years too. “The department had to rely on the willing seller model, which slowed down sales,” said a Treasury official. But, as many willing sellers increasingly backed by land claimants will testify, the inability of the department’s bureaucratic machinery to process claims and conclude complex rural real estate transactions, sometimes involving hundreds of millions of rands, has proved as serious an obstacle.
Government wants restitution, which allows people dispossessed through racist laws or practices to reclaim ancestral land or be compensated for the loss, to be wrapped up without delay. It is politically divisive, fans racial tensions, depresses rural economies and negatively impacts on foreign investor confidence. Expenditure failures are therefore of national importance. But even the far less significant combined underspending of about R100 million for SA’s other two land reform programmes – redistribution and tenure reform – remains of grave concern. These programmes must see to it that 30% of white farmland goes to blacks by 2014 without ruining rural economies dependent on commercial agriculture, secure tenure rights for over one million workers and labour tenants who remain on farms – traditionally the most vulnerable in our society – and privatise 16 million hectares of communal land affecting 21 million people. f anything, allocations and spending for these programmes should be ramped up dramatically.
This is especially true of implementing the Communal Land Rights Act, the key to unlocking the economic potential of former homelands, a process arguably as politically explosive, expensive and more complex than restitution. Implementation is slated to start this year, pending the outcome of a constitutional challenge. he initial request to Treasury in 2004 for implementing the act was R700 million a year. Yet in 2006/07 it received just R26 million, rising to R29 million in 2009/10. reasury felt the department had not presented a clear, coherent implementation strategy and has approved funds for a pilot only. Treasury officials conceded surveying boundaries of former homelands and settling ownership disputes could cost 20 times more a year. “But this is public money. It was felt a big bang approach was not suitable without an articulated strategy,” said one official. – Stephan Hofstätter
