MORE THAN 90 per cent of the formerly white-owned farms the South African government bought to allocate to victims of apartheid have failed commercially, a government minister has said.
Minister of rural development and land affairs Gugile Nkwinti said the land reform programme’s failure had prompted the government to abandon the initiative, as they would not reach the target of transferring 30 per cent of land to non-whites by 2014.
Following the onset of democracy in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) government established the flagship programme to redistribute the country’s land, the vast majority of which was in the possession of the white population, in an equitable manner.
However, Mr Nkwinti told reporters in Cape Town: “The reality is that this has not happened. We have not talked about the revenue that the state has lost because farms totalling 5.9 million hectares, which were active and accruing revenue for the state, were handed over to people.
“And more than 90 per cent of those farms are now not functional. They are not productive and the state loses revenue.
“We cannot afford to go on like that.”
The minister also warned beneficiaries of the redistribution programme who were leaving their farms unproductive that their land would be repossessed, in order to ensure agricultural output did not fall further.
According to Mr Nkwinti, the main reason behind the land reform programme’s failure was that those who benefited did not have the skills “to continue producing effectively and optimally on the land”.
He went on to say new proposals to turn around the now defunct initiative had already been drawn up and would be presented to cabinet for approval by the end of this month. They would then be made public by the end of May.
As a stopgap measure, the government had set aside just under €50 million this year to aid the farms currently in trouble.
Included in the policy document, Mr Nkwinti added, would be a proposal to restrict foreign ownership of South African land, as non-nationals were buying it up three times faster than the government was able to acquire it for redistribution.
The restriction of land ownership by non-South Africans was first mooted during the era of former South African president Thabo Mbeki, which ended in September 2008, but the government of the day never followed through on the proposal.