Gugile Nkwinti. Picture: TREVOR SAMSON
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THE government has been advised by one of South Africa’s foremost legal experts that there are no legal obstacles to reopening its land restitution programme as planned next month, even though questions have been raised about its ability to cover the potential R197bn price tag.
Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti said in an interview with Business Day last week that President Jacob Zuma received legal opinion from Jeremy Gauntlett SC that dealt with legal challenges raised by, among others, the Democratic Alliance. South Africa’s largest opposition party has pointed to the lack of available funding.
The government’s previous land restitution process was dogged by controversy and poor administration. Last year it was announced that only 8% of claimed land had been returned to those stripped of ownership by the 1913 Natives Land Act.
The African National Congress (ANC) has come under pressure for poor delivery on land reform, despite spending more than R50bn on it.
Mr Nkwinti has also published a policy proposal that commercial farmers give their workers a 50% stake in their farms, with the government paying for their share.
The redistribution process has raised concerns over food security for South Africa’s expanding population — 41-million in 1995 and 51.8-million in the 2013 census.
Mr Nkwinti said much of the agricultural land that had been returned to black owners was not productive, reinforcing the pre-1994 economic structures that placed responsibility on a small group of 35,000 white, commercial farmers to produce food for the population.
AgriSA president Johannes Moller said reopening the claims process would add uncertainty in the agricultural sector and make it less attractive to investors. Mr Moller said the sector needed more investment to ensure productivity and food security. More than half the commercial agriculture farmers were not making sufficient profits, he said.
AgriSA’s view was that the government should clear the backlog of about 10,000 land claims from before the previous deadline before taking on new ones.
The Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill will, once promulgated, extend the deadline for lodging a claim for restitution until the end of December 2018 from the previous deadline of the end of December 1998. There are an estimated 397,000 valid restitution claims for apartheid-era forced removals.
Mr Nkwiniti said only about 80,000 claims were lodged by the 1998 deadline, while 3.5-million people had been forcibly evicted from their land or otherwise shifted to the homelands during the apartheid era; and about 4-million people had lost land under "betterment" schemes.
Mr Nkwinti said effective systems were in place to process new claims at a faster pace. The processing of the previous 80,000 claims had been slow partly because it was done manually and files often got lost. "Everything is now electronic. We are much more ready," he said.
The amendment bill would also allow for exceptional claims by the Khoi and San people for the dispossession of land before the promulgation of the 1913 Native Land Act.
Mr Nkwinti said the government was ready to buy land on behalf of the claimants, despite a growing push from leftist political formations such as the Economic Freedom Fighters that it expropriate land that was historically "stolen" without compensation.
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