They need to think about Zimbabwe and get on with it
Red tape stalls S. Africa land transfers
Competing claims of blacks delay sales of white-owned farms
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 2/16/2004
SEKGOPO, South Africa -- In the fertile Limpopo valley, where juicy mangoes hang heavily from trees and sweet-tasting watermelons grow by the tens of thousands on the vines, the feelings about land run deep.
For the last three generations, since whites took the land from blacks, the town of Sekgopo has been neatly divided along racial lines. Some 20,000 blacks today live in houses crowded together in a depression in the land, where wind kicks up clouds of dust from the dirt roads, while hundreds of whites live on shady farms that ring the village, raising cattle and growing vegetables and fruit on so much land that it stretches to the hills on the horizon.
Soon, many hope, the wrongs of this history will come to an end. But in sharp contrast to neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government more than three years ago unleashed paramilitary forces to seize white-owned farms, many white farmers here are driving the process. They want to sell.
The holdup in Limpopo province and many other rural areas of South Africa, say land reform advocates, is that competing claims among black groups and government bureaucracy have delayed the process for years.
Few blacks have the money to buy the land, or start a farming operation, leaving them dependent on the government to make the deals as well as offer them grants to pay for seed and fertilizer. And in many cases, desirable parcels of land are caught up in complex legal cases under the postapartheid land redistribution procedure.
"There's no doubt that a lot of white farmers are willing to sell and get out," said Marc Wegerif, manager for research and policy at Nkuzi Development Association, which assists blacks in land rights cases. The bottleneck, he said, is that the "government is not giving adequate attention to sorting out the issues."
Wegerif's group and other advocates hope that they can pressure the governing African National Congress in the next two months -- prior to the April 14 national election -- to quicken the pace of negotiations and commit more funds to settle claims. In 1994, after ending three centuries of white minority rule, black government leaders pledged to transfer 30 percent of white-owned farmland to nonwhites in five years. Today, nearly a decade later, they have transferred less than 3 percent.
"People think the radical moment of transition in 1994 has passed," said Edward Lahiff of the Program for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. "But land is the big unfinished business."
