3 November 2004
When we talk about land in South Africa , we have to go back to the beginning. We cannot forget t he history of conquest and dispossession: land was taken away from the indigenous people by colonialists and the apartheid government; livelihoods and socio-political systems were destroyed.
This dispossession was followed by the most brutal and racist exploitation of land and people: through successive systems of labour coercion, or ‘unfree labour’, including slavery, as part of the emergence, growth and development of a capitalist economy of a special type in South Africa . Simply, land dispossession also forced black people to go and work as cheap labour in the mines, factories and in the agricultural sector.
Under apartheid, the racist state consolidated and entrenched landlessness by the majority through continuing forced removals and carefully nurturing and supporting white commercial farmers: forced removals, Land Bank support, state subsidies and protection, and cheap black labour.
Yes, our democratic government has done a lot of work to recognise and protect land rights of the landless since 1994:
All in all, the measures taken by our government are only a start. More must and can still be done by government to accelerate land and agrarian reform.
Now in 2004, after more than three centuries of dispossession, exploitation and racist oppression, the white, male-dominated commercial agricultural sector, owns more than 80% of our land and is actively resisting and opposing land reform! In a country of 44 million people, only 44,000 commercial farmers still own more than 80% of our land! These same farmers still exploit and abuse more than 1 million farm workers! They blackmail us when we demand land for the landless by saying that any such demand is irresponsible and will inflame emotions. We reject this blackmail!
What is their contribution to democracy? What is their contribution to addressing the historical land grievance? How can they justify the reality that more than 80% of productive land is still in the hands of a minority? How can they justify the reality that less than 3% of this land has been redistributed to the landless over the last ten years? What have they done about this, and what are they going to do to correct this huge historic, social, political and economic injustice? These are the questions we are asking them today. These are the questions which can no longer be postponed. These are the questions which have led the Communist Party to call on you as the workers, the landless, the rural poor, the rural women, to come out today to march and demonstrate for the whole world to see and know that we all demand land to the poor.
Clearly, the results of more than three centuries of dispossession cannot be reversed overnight. But we have to understand why this is the case and what the alternatives are. When the Communist Party looks at why land reform has been so slow, we identify five obstacles:
All these five obstacles postpone the interests of the historically disposed in favour of the interests of current landowners.
It was for all these reasons that the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture and Land Affairs in the National Assembly convened public hearings on the progress and pace and land reform from 19 to 21 October 2004 . In these hearings, the overwhelming message was “the pace and progress of land reform is too slow”.
But what is happening on the land issue reflects what is happening in the rest of the economy. The economy continues to be owned and controlled by a few who have continued to make profits whilst at the same time retrenching, casualising, outsourcing and informalising millions of workers; blacklisting many millions more; redlining all our townships so that we do not get housing finance; exposing us to loan sharks; and starving us with high food prices.
The land struggle also shows how the South African economy continues to rely on the exploitation and oppression of women. Black women generally, and African women in particular, have played the central role in the South African economy: the unpaid labour of landless and rightless women in rural areas supported the production of able-bodied men to work in the mines, factories and farms. This was also the case in the former homelands and it remains the case today. Up to now, land reform has not fundamentally transformed gender relations in the countryside. That is why as the Communist Party we say that the Communal Land Rights Act needs to be reviewed because it continues to subordinate women’s rights in rural areas to male-dominated councils and tribal authorities.
Our demands for land and agrarian reform strike at the heart of racism and capitalism. That is why the struggle of poor landless people for land is part of the broader struggle for social, political and economic emancipation. For the Communist Party, this struggle is also about rolling back capitalism and building socialism.
Land reform and the constitution
In the course of the campaign we have been seeking answers to several important questions, including:
Although our campaign has only been underway for a few weeks, it is already evident that the answer to all of the above questions is basically: No. No, our budgets are not enough for land reform. No, the willing-seller, willing-buyer principle does not support land reform. No, the market-based approach does not work with the land reform agenda.
For whatever reason, many people in South Africa believe that the property clause in the Bill of Rights (Constitution) blocks land reform. But what does the property clause actually say?
Yes, the clause does state that “no one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.” This is quite correct, and the SACP fully supports this principled and law-based approach to property. BUT this is not all. The same clause then allows for the expropriation of property “for a public purpose or in the public interest” with compensation. But the constitution does not say this compensation must be at market levels. In fact, this compensation can be negotiated or decided by a court. But how will a court decide? The constitution explains this. It says that the price must take into account 6 factors:
So the market value is not the only factor. We must now pay attention to the other factors particularly given the fact that the history of South Africa , is essentially a history of land dispossession. The 44,000 white-owned commercial farms in our country have all been acquired by one or another form of historic dispossession. They have all benefited from generous state subsidies and other assistance paid for by tax-payers, over a prolonged period. Many of them remain heavily indebted to the Land Bank and other financial institutions. There is also much un- and under-utilised agricultural land, and there is absentee landlordism. According to the constitution, the “public interest” “includes the nation’s commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa ’s natural resources.”
The property clause is a property rights clause, but this is not the end of the story. It is also a land reform clause. This reading means that it is not the property clause that blocks land reform but rather that it is a narrow “willing-seller, willing-buyer” approach that is out of step with the intentions and spirit of the Bill of Rights! The SACP believes in neither a market-driven process nor in a lawless land-grab. These are NOT the only alternatives available.
Sustainable land reform
It is absolutely important to ensure that we approach land reform within the context of our progressive Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, we must ensure that our approach to land is not just legalistic, but that it also has a sustainable and progressive ECONOMIC logic, based on mass organisation and mobilisation. Resettling a community on their traditional land without adequate infrastructure or financing, and without adequate agricultural extension programmes, may unintentionally leave the community worse off than before.
Willing sellers and willing (or sufficiently wealthy) buyers seldom occur in a coherent block of land. The market is typically random. The brief history of this approach in our country has seen a patch-work of isolated farms coming into the land reform programme. With a dispersed patch-work of land reform farms it is extremely costly, if not impossible, for government to assist new farmers with infrastructure, inputs and marketing – yet these are often essential for the success or failure of most agricultural transformation programmes, especially in their early phases.
The SACP wants to see land reform policies that are constitutional and legal, of course. But we also require policies that are informed by an integrated approach that addresses infra-structural needs, agricultural inputs, marketing and financing, and the consolidation of food security, the building of skills, and the general fostering of sustainable communities. This suggests that a law-governed and economically coherent expropriation policy needs to be one key element for the success of land reform.
What do we demand?
That is why then today we are here to demand:
Let us ensure that:
We say that these things must STOP:
We say farm-workers and their families must have rights and basic services.
We say that there must be:
free education for farm-workers’ children
We call for a National Land Summit to be convened by NEDLAC within the next 12 months. The Summit must b ring together government, farm workers, landless people, rural women, landowners and farmers in order to:
Through our action today, we also acknowledge and salute all our people and all progressive forces for the struggles they have waged for land redistribution to benefit the overwhelming majority of our people. As they know, this Red Saturday is only a step in an ongoing and thorough-going ongoing campaign.
Without satisfactory results, we will be calling on our people to step up popular mobilisation directed at land-owners through the building of People’s Land Committees and the general organisation of the landless, rural women, farm dwellers, farm workers and rural youth.
We will also engage with government on an ongoing basis to ensure that it plays its role to accelerate land reform in favour of the landless, the workers and the poor.
The struggle does not end today. Painstaking work will be required to conscientise and unite landless people, to formulate and struggle for specific demands at a local level, to pursue these issues within formal structures such as ANC structures, constituency offices, trade unions, women’s organisations, municipalities, tribal authorities, etc. We must encourage the culture of self-mobilisation and self-organisation of the landless, farm workers and rural dwellers through People’s Land Committees, communal gardens, co-operatives, and identification of unused land.
Building these People’s Land Committees is important. These Committees can be the voice and power of the landless. In these committees, we can unite, sit down and talk together as the landless poor, existing agricultural committees, farm workers, rural women, rural youth, existing Communal Property Associations, rural & land organisations, co-operatives, etc. We can use the committees to learn, share, strategise and struggle together and engage government, farmers, traditional leaders, etc. Let us leave this march today with the commitment to build such People’s Land Committees.
The Communist Party knows very clearly that the land-owners want our government to be on their side. No, we will not allow this. We will ensure that we deepen unity between, on the one hand, a progressive and democratic state, with, on the other hand, the organised mass power of the landless rather than the opposite. It is this unity, of our government and our people, that is the answer to the power of the bosses.