Pressure mounts on government to sign a land memorandum

Agri SA, Nafu and TAU SA are in the process of negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with government to identify the true state of landownership in South Africa. This is almost four years after government and agricultural roleplayers asked for such an audit at the Land Summit.
Nafu president Motsepe Matlala said a land audit by an independent competent authority is extremely necessary to help government and people in South Africa stop speculating about which land belongs to who. “It’s only once we know the true state of landownership that we‘ll be able to progress towards the resolution of land issues,” he said.
Dr Theo de Jager, deputy president of Agri SA, added there’s renewed urgency for such an audit due to government’s recent claims it might have to scrap some willing-buyer, willing-seller transactions because of the slow pace of land reform.
“Agri SA and TAU don’t believe government’s figures are a true reflection of landownership in South Africa,” he said. “Government recently claimed white farmers still own 80% of land, while only 18% is currently under black ownership. This implies less than 5% of land has been transferred since 1994 under government’s land reform and restitution programmes.”
Dr De Jager said government only counts transactions towards land reform in which it was involved. This is in spite of vast amounts of private transactions between white and black farmers since 1996. Government also doesn’t acknowledge land in shared ownership or trusts as being owned by black farmers.
In addition, it’s unclear if government is talking about title deeds under white ownership, or the area of land. The audit could be far more comprehensive if it accounted for the number of title deeds or the area under ownership in each population group. The amount of arable and non-arable land as well as farm profitability per hectare and farming unit will also be accounted for.
Further, the number of people living and employed on farms will be identified. “Many people lose houses and employment in restitution deals,” explained Dr De Jager. “We need to ensure restitution deals don’t add to poverty.” The audit of the amount of people on farms is also necessary to refute claims 1 million people have been illegally evicted and more than 2,8 million stand to be illegally evicted.
The audit aims to identify the amount of land owned by government. Dr De Jager said government owns vast amounts of land belonging to various departments on national, provincial and municipal level. “We feel it owns much more than white farmers,” said Dr De Jager.
He said the main obstacle to the signing of the MoU is that the Department of Land Affairs and Agriculture want exclusive ownership of audit data. “We won’t settle for this because giving government full ownership could allow them to manipulate results,” said Dr De Jager. – Glenneis Erasmus