SOUTH AFRICA: Current reforms are not the right way forward, a white farmer tells Bill Corcoran in Limpopo
South African farmer Phile Van Zyle could be forgiven for feeling paranoid about his future following the South African government's recent announcement that many white-owned farms may be be expropriated from next month.
The 48-year-old tomato farmer has been living in an uncertain world since 1999 when the first of nine land claims were lodged against him by claimants who maintain they were dispossessed under the apartheid regime of ancestral land now in his possession .
If the land claims are deemed valid by the government's adjudicating body, the Land Claims Commission, Van Zyle, whose family has farmed the area for eight generations, will have to accept a compensation package and move on, or try to rent back his former land.
"Farmers in the Limpopo province tend to have a fatalistic approach to the issues of land redistribution and restitution due to their close proximity to Zimbabwe and the events that unfolded there. So when the government says it is going to begin expropriating land, people get nervous," he says.
Last week chief land-claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya said the government would cease negotiating with white farmers where the negotiations had gone on for more than three years.
In 1994 the ANC agreed it would not expropriate white-owned farms following international pressure. Instead, dispossessed individuals and communities would be allowed to buy land from farmers with assistance from the government.
Under apartheid large sections of the black majority were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes and relocated to homelands, leaving whites in control of 87 per cent of the land. When the ANC came to power it earmarked land redistribution as one of its main priorities.
However, in the last 12 years the government has only managed to increase black ownership of land from 13 per cent to 16 per cent because most of the settled claims were urban.
The decision to change policy, according to Mr Gwanya, was taken because there were still in excess of 7,000 claims waiting to be processed by the Land Claims Court, with the intricacies of individual claims causing delays in a process originally scheduled to end last December.
He insists that from March farmers whose land had been the subject of valid land claims would have to accept the level of financial compensation the government deemed appropriate.
However, agricultural groups say the government is trying to blame them unfairly for the slow roll-out of the programme.
Mr Van Zyle has been heavily identified with the land redistribution programme because of claims against him and his presidency of Agri-Limpopo. He says that of the remaining claims "at least a couple of thousand" are located in Limpopo. "What is happening with these land claims is people are seeing a free-for-all. Black people who have nothing see a chance of getting some land, while bankrupt white farmers see a chance of selling land at a high price.
"Often you get a farmer and claimant who agree there is a valid claim and want to settle, but another claimant comes along and says they too were dispossessed of that land. Claimants rarely have deeds of ownership, so the court must evaluate hearsay evidence," he says.
In his own case, Mr Van Zyle insists he was dropped into the quagmire when his farming neighbour invited members of the black community to come to his farm to show them where they could make a claim.
"He also told them they should claim against my land, so they did," he says.
None of the claims lodged against him are valid, he maintains, because the alleged dispossessions occurred before the apartheid era. To have a valid claim a dispossession must have been driven by apartheid politics and occurred between 1913 and the end of apartheid.
"My family started farming here in 1888 as small subsistence farmers and the Boers arrived in the 1850s. The blacks arrived 50 years previously: we were all settlers," he observes. "The only real indigenous people were the Bushmen and both blacks and the whites killed them off."
Mr Van Zyle argues that if the government simply implemented the current willing-buyer willing-seller principle it would result in an acceptable outcome for all. It might just take a little longer.
And he hopes the government's latest threat is more about securing votes than a serious move to expropriate land. "South Africa has a local election on March 1st, so the government is trying to ensure votes by giving the impression it is going to take a stand against the unco-operative farmers," he argues.
Apartheid: redressing the wrongs of land seizure
South Africa's Land Claims Commission was established in 1994. By 1998, 68,000 claims had been referred to the Land Claims Court for adjudication. In 1999 the government gave the land affairs minister powers to make awards on negotiated settlements, which significantly increased the process's pace.
By last March 59,345 claims had been settled. About 80 per cent of the claims related to urban areas. The majority of claimants sought financial compensation to the tune of 2.4 billion rand (nearly €330m) rather than the return of their land.
The remaining 20 per cent of settlements were rural. A typical rural claim involves between 300 and 4,000 households and relates to plots of land between 300 and 15,000 hectares in size.