Thabo Mbeki’s sudden departure as president last month, and the rather churlish walkout of a sizable chunk of his cabinet, sent jitters through many quarters.
Admittedly, the news of finance minister Trevor Manuel’s resignation made more waves than the rest put together, but the rand’s immediate losses against major currencies were reversed almost as quickly when he announced he was prepared to serve under a new administration.
Manuel, unlike many Mbeki stalwarts, cast out into the political wilderness at the ANC conference in Polokwane last year, retained his senior place on the party’s national executive committee (NEC) list. But he has been subjected to continuous sniping from leftist quarters within the party and its alliance partners, the Communist Party and Cosatu, for his market-friendly policies and insistence on fiscal discipline.Which makes it tempting to think Manuel’s announcement was a demonstration of his power calculated to silence his critics, to show you can remove a president without doing the country much harm but had better think twice before meddling with a competent and respected finance minister.
Manuel claims he was simply following accepted protocol because he served at the president’s pleasure, and the new incumbent should be free to make his own choice without having to sack him. Either way, for now he has cemented his position as the best man to run the country’s coffers, whether by default because no one better could be found at short notice, or design. Our new president Kgalema Motlanthe is everyone’s favourite compromise candidate. He doesn’t have a cloud hanging over his head like ANC president Jacob Zuma, has managed to retain allies in both the Zuma and Mbeki camps when divisions in the ANC were threatening to tear the party apart, and has shown disdain for rash outbursts by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, including his “kill for Zuma” comments.
Motlanthe has not disappointed. In his first speech to the nation he made reassuring noises that he’d ensure continuity in political and administrative leadership, and wouldn’t be tampering with policies and processes that were working well, particularly in macro-economics.
It’s therefore safe to assume we aren’t in for any major policy shifts affecting agriculture. The presidential working group on agriculture is likely to keep convening, there will be no wholesale nationalisation of private property, including land, and food security remains a national strategic priority. Right now it’s unclear whether Motlanthe is simply holding the fort for Zuma until the elections next year, or if he’ll keep the crown. Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder hinted he might not relinquish power easily once he’d become used to it. Mulder told parliament a story of two trekboers surprised by lions one night. They quickly harnessed their oxen and fled. At first light they discovered they’d harnessed one of the lions by mistake. It’s easy to harness a lion in the dark, one muttered, but it’s another matter entirely to unharness it. Would the ANC be able to unharness the lion it had harnessed in this dark time of crisis? Mulder asked, provoking gales of laughter from Zuma.
In several respects Zuma may yet prove a suitable president for agriculture. He has gone out of his way to reach out to the commercial farming community, attending the Grain conference in Bothaville and repeatedly making public statements about the vital importance of farmers to the nation’s stability and prosperity.
e also has a better appreciation than Mbeki ever showed that the lot of millions of black South Africans living in rural slums in former homelands has, if anything, gotten worse since the end of apartheid, because the ANC government has done little to kick start and incentivise investment in infrastructure, market access and commercial agriculture in these areas.
Moreover, Mbeki’s closed leadership style antagonised leftist land critics, who felt the president was making secret concessions to organised agriculture at presidential working group meetings, which has contributed to tensions and polarisation in a sector that can ill afford them. Zuma is likely to be more inclusive, where Motlanthe may keep things the way they are. Would change be bad? Whether the status quo is desirable is questionable. Right now neither the landed nor landless are benefiting much from the way things are run, because land and agriculture minister Lulama Xingwana, who retained her post, is more interested in populist grandstanding to score points with voters than serving the sector.
This manifests itself in several ways. For commercial agriculture, there has been a loss of drive, direction and urgency in areas ranging from targeted research and market intelligence to disease control. For black farm tenants who were promised white-owned land would be parcelled out to them at the end of apartheid to reverse decades of discrimination, land reforms have all but ground to a halt as a demotivated, poorly staffed and unskilled land affairs department sinks under the weight of its responsibilities. In the last five years the story of land reform has been entirely rescripted. The programme is explicitly aimed at reversing the effects, including economic, of racist restrictions on landownership under apartheid. Resistance from some white landowners who stood to lose from the reforms was inevitable, and took the form of legal action, inflated land prices, obstructive behaviour and threats of violence. But countless visits to farming communities in several parts of the country to report on land issues, have shown me that landowners and the landless increasingly find themselves on the same page, trying to forge a workable solution together.
Sure, there are many false starts, tensions, misconceptions, hiccups and wrong turns along the way, but time and again, I’ve found their greatest obstacle was an unnecessarily complicated land reform programme the land department has neither the resources nor, with few exceptions, the competent staff to implement properly.
The issue was highlighted by a recent joint statement by the Landless People’s Movement, a land activism lobby that once struck fear into the hearts of landowners for implicitly advocating violent farm seizures, and the Agricultural District Union in northern KwaZulu-Natal, a hotbed of violent land-related conflict. Both blamed bungled land reforms for the current impasse, not each other, and pledged to work together to find common solutions. Paralysis appears to have set in, probably from a combination of poor political leadership and because infighting in the ANC has left even competent and diligent officials unsure what’s demanded of them. This is evident from a text message from an ANC member and land activist sent to several senior members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), warning the pace of land delivery to blacks should be increased tremendously, but that “there is no land being given to the communities at this stage”. He warned, “if the ANC next want to campaign and claim to be committed to giving land to blacks, no one will believe that, if things are allowed to go this way where [Land Affairs] and the [Land Claims] Commission are messing everything up”. The NEC members undertook to raise the issue at the same meeting where Mbeki’s axing was decided.
Losing credibility to expropriation bluster
Rather than taking criticism on the chin and finding constructive ways to improve performance with the limited resources they have to perform a gargantuan task, lands officials have resorted to bluster, scare tactics and discrediting their critics. I recently reported on a case in the Waterberg north of Johannesburg where, after administrative errors, including bungled valuations and lengthy delays in honouring purchase offers, commission officials blamed landowners for being obstructive and started making noises about expropriating their land. This fuelled fears, however unjustified, that the cash-strapped commission was holding out for the new expropriation law so they could force owners to sell at below market value.
Meanwhile, community leaders told me enthusiastically about joint venture agreements with landowners that would lay the foundations for long-term prosperity for the entire district. Claimants would own their ancestral land again, become shareholders in lucrative commercial ventures, and be trained to take over full ownership and management of these companies over time.
Yet a decade after lodging their claims, they had become bogged down in an administrative malaise. One leader conceded it had taken a while for his community to find common ground with the landowners, but was emphatic the only obstacle to settling the claim was the commission. He begged me for advice on how he could get the Land Claims Commission to do its job, echoing pleas I’ve heard from many communities around the country. I had no answer.
When I asked the commission to discuss the negative perceptions its actions were creating, after a lengthy delay, I received a flat denial that expropriation was being considered for any properties in the Waterberg. This is contradicted by internal correspondence I’ve seen, written by commission officials, who refer to specific properties as “expropriation cases” and have drawn up lists of farms earmarked for expropriation. I’ve heard these tactics have ceased, and purchase offers are again being honoured. But the damage to credibility has been done.
This lesson isn’t lost on the post-Polokwane ANC that swept to power last month. The party’s secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, recently expressed dissatisfaction at the divisive way land reform is being implemented, and wants the focus to be on wealth creation rather than the number of hectares delivered. Similar sentiments were expressed by party president Jacob Zuma and its treasurer general Matthews Phosa.
Their attitude probably contributed to the demise of the controversial Expropriation Bill, which was shelved last month by the Parliamentary Committee on Public Works. The bill is deeply flawed, which makes it difficult to see why an otherwise rational person such as former land and agriculture minister Thoko Didiza would have supported it so vigorously. Phosa recently told a poverty conference in Pretoria the ANC did not believe expropriation was the right instrument to speed up land reform, and that SA would only be peaceful when more people owned property and assets they wanted to protect. This will please farmers and the investment community at a time when reassurances are sorely needed.
But they help paralyse land reform. Expropriation can help speed up reforms if used properly. Owners unreasonably resisting sale must know the state can force their hand, but only if a judge is persuaded its in the public interest and compensation is fair and just. – Stephan Hofstätter
Stephan Hofstätter is a Farmer’s Weekly contributing editor. E-mail him at [email protected]. |fw
