1. INTRODUCTION
As the South African Communist Party (SACP, we ended 2004 on a high note, after a successful Red October Campaign for Land, Bread and Work to launch a thoroughgoing land and agrarian reform campaign. The Campaign had a huge impact on, and resonance with our people.
We estimate that about 20-25 000 people participated in marches and pickets on the National Day of Action on 6 November 2004. This National Day of Action was preceded by a range of intense engagements with the landless and rural masses, through people’s forums and farm workers’ tribunals. In total there were more than 70 such forums/tribunals throughout the country which reached about 10,000 people. In addition, some provinces held pickets and marches to the banks, to take forward the financial sector campaign. This was a good start even though it fell short of expectations for reasons of resources, effective mobilisation, difficulty of access in some rural areas and farms and the short time-span for the campaign.
The 3 main demands we submitted through these marches were:
In our view, the Red October Campaign has also contributed enormously in raising a number of key questions:
The primary challenge facing our Party and all progressive forces struggling for land and agrarian transformation is the unity in strategy and action of a wide range of progressive and mass forces to take forward this struggle: a people’s coalition for land, bread and work, so to speak.
When we met on 15 October 2004, as this wide range of organisations, we emerged with a consensus towards a common minimum platform which included the following:
To debate further the alternatives to the willing buyer, willing seller principle, the need to shift the restitution date, a common and appropriate strategy towards unused land, the need to decommodify land and food to ensure food security, other government policies including the budget and the various forms of organisation that are needed to organise people living and working in farms and rural areas
This minimum platform does not include a very strong NUMSA argument, presented at the 15 October meeting, to put the issue of food security at the centre of the campaign as it is of immediate concern for all workers.
We also agreed that we will meet again, as we are doing today, to prepare for a further National Consultative People’s Land Conference. This parliament of the landless will seek to mobilise the widest range of forces to prepare for the National Land Summit around a common & pro-poor platform. We also committed ourselves to engage government, AgriSA, the churches, parliament, CONTRALESA, NAFU and all other relevant institutions and organisations in the pursuit of common objectives. We must now use today’s meeting to take forward all these commitments.
2. THE NATIONAL LAND SUMMIT
It is critical that the National Land Summit must be secured and held this year. This Summit should bring together government, farm workers and labour organisations, landless people, landowners & agricultural capital in order to:
The time has now come for all of us to think and work hard to ensure that we can secure the Summit this year and to ensure that it is not a talking shop but delivers concrete outcomes. This is not to be seen as a once-off event but as part of a process of building a united voice. In our view, critical tasks in this regard include:
In the demands submitted, we also demanded a land audit, to be conducted before the National Land Summit, to focus, amongst other things on:
But this is not a demand to be met by government alone. It is a strategic opportunity to mobilise the landless around this land audit where they live. At the 15 October meeting, COSATU reminded us of existing resolutions by the church committing the church to provide unused land in their ownership to the landless through a government-led process.
The People’s Land Conference must not only harmonise our demands and programme in preparation for the National Land Summit but it must also be used for two other tasks: the mobilisation of our people around the land audit and their land demands, and to co-ordinate our struggles beyond the Summit. We must really all go out to mobilise our people through mass meetings and tribunals, identification of unused land, as well as engaging with government as part of compiling people’s demands. Effective consultation is needed with all structures.
Considerable efforts are required to conscientise and unite landless people, to formulate 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. and to stimulate a culture of self-mobilisation and self-organisation through People’s Land Committees, communal gardens, co-operatives, and identification of unused land. Such ‘pressure from below’ has been noticeably absent in the land reform process to date. Mobilisation of this sort will require new alliances between political organisations and mass movements.
A central theme in the Red October Campaign was the need to challenge agricultural capital. Ten years into a democratic South Africa, we have seen massive resistance to land reform and protection of apartheid land ownership patterns and slave-labour conditions under which close to a million farm workers still toil. We have argued that therefore agricultural capital must answer the question: 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 some 46,000 white corporations and individual farmers? 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? What is their contribution to the land restitution process? To date this sector has only been involved on a one to one basis with government. We began to see the National Land Summit as an important opportunity for this discussion to take place in order to extract concessions from agricultural capital to ensure that a historic breakthrough on the land and agrarian question is achieved. Agri-SA has replied to the SACP in the form of a brief letter which states that:
As the SACP, we have not replied to this letter yet hoping that today’s meeting will debate our common strategy & tactics on engaging Agri-SA including sending a broad and representative delegation to such an initial meeting. We suggest that we use this meeting to discuss and agree on what key result we want to achieve from the meeting with AgriSA. We suggest the following:
3. THE ROLE OF THE STATE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LANDLESS
Given the strategic position of the SACP in its alliance relationship with the ANC, our strategy and tactics of engaging government are critical. As we said at the 15 October National Consultative Conference, the SACP strategy is premised on realising that the state is not a monolithic structure but it is a highly contested terrain of class struggle. The SACP strategy is to work to strengthen the hand of the supportive block within the state in order to ensure that the working class can impact and influence the structure, role & function of the state in favour of the workers and the poor.
The Communist Party is keenly interested in deepening unity between, on the one hand, a progressive and democratic state and parliament, with, on the other hand, the organised mass power of the landless. This unity is critical in shaping an appropriate relationship of engagement and struggle with the agricultural capital who are beneficiaries of colonial and apartheid land dispossession. Indeed the state has an interest in the success of the agricultural sector. But this cannot be on the carcass of landless.
In other words, the role of the democratic government is critical in addressing the historical land grievance. The democratic government has a constitutional mandate and legislative, budgetary and implementation power which must all be now used advance a thorough-going and pro-poor land reform process. One of the practical things is that of a state-led industrial strategy for the agriculture sector .
But we need to debate the spaces available for such a strategy to succeed. How government responds to the demands is going to be critical and thus the need for the Party to continue engaging closely with the Minister and the relevant departments and parastatal institutions. Other organisations and forces have a role to play too.
4. DEBATING THE WILLING SELLER, WILLING BUYER PRINCIPLE & THE PROPERTY CLAUSE
In the course of the campaign we have been seeking answers to several important questions, including:
It is already evident that the answer to all of the above questions is basically: No. Minister of Finance, cde Trevor Manuel’s announcement in October of adjusted expenditure estimates for land restitution is one (but still limited) concession that not nearly enough has been allocated to this critical transformation programme. How we move forward to achieve our strategic objectives is, of course, a matter for ongoing debate, including popular debate in the course of rural mobilisation. The SACP does not claim to have all the answers ready made in our pockets.
There are, however, forces in our society (like the Democratic Alliance and AgriSA – the union representing the interests of agribusiness in South Africa) that are trying to stifle debate before it has even begun. In particular, they are trying to suggest that the SACP’s interrogation of the willing-seller, willing-buyer policy is “unconstitutional”. They are seeking to outlaw any approach to land reform that is not narrowly market-driven, and they are trying to imply that the only alternative to a willing-seller, willing buyer approach is an illegal land-grab.
What the Constitution actually says
For whatever reason, there is a frequent assumption in South Africa that the property clause in the Bill of Rights is an impediment to major land reform. It is an assumption that leads to frequent lamentation in some left quarters, and to celebration on the right. So let’s remind ourselves what the property clause (Clause 25) in our Bill of Rights actually says.
The first sub-clause (25.1), affirms 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.
The second sub-clause then allows for the expropriation of property, but it sets clear conditions for such expropriation. It must be:
Sub-clause 3 then elaborates on the criteria required to establish what is appropriate compensation. It calls for “an equitable balance between public interest and the interests of those affected, having regard to all relevant circumstances”. Five “relevant circumstances” are then listed as guiding principles and only ONE of them refers to the “market value of the property”.
The other principles are the “current use of the property”, “the history of the acquisition and use of the property”; “the extent of direct state investment and subsidy in the acquisition and beneficial capital improvement of the property”; and “the purpose of the expropriation.”
It is to these other four principles that we should increasingly pay attention, particularly given the fact that the history of South Africa, is essentially a history of land dispossession. In our view not enough attention has been paid to these principles, thus the tendency to elevate the “willing buyer willing seller principle” as the primary method through which to drive land reform in our country.
All of these principles are very relevant to compensation in the South African context. 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.
The Bill of Rights is enjoining us to take ALL of these factors into account (and not just market price) in calculating compensation for expropriated farms. The next sub-clause, 25.4 is careful to specify that the “public interest” referred to in the previous sub-clause “includes the nation’s commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa’s natural resources.”
A brief review of the property clause suggests that it may well be 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 that the present policy needs to be reviewed and alternative or additional approaches to acquiring land must be pursued. Obviously, some of these alternative policies will have to be adequately provided for in legislation. 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 legal, but that it also has a sustainable and progressive ECONOMIC logic, buttressed by mass organisation and mobilisation. Land restitution based on a legitimate historical claim is of great importance. However, resettling a community on their traditional land, but without adequate infrastructure or financing, and without adequate agricultural extension programmes, may unintentionally leave the community worse off than before.
A similar practical problem relates to the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land reform. 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. This has two negative consequences:
In short, relying on the market mechanism for land reform will produce a scattered patch-work of new farms that is much more likely to result in economic failure. It is a formula that is particularly discriminatory of the millions of rural poor in our country.
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 infrastructural 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.
5. THE NEED FOR POLICY ALTERNATIVES
The National Land Summit is also an important challenge for progressive forces to work with the landless and rural masses to develop and advance concrete pro-poor policy options to accelerate land and agrarian reform. Whilst there is general agreement amongst many of the progressive organisations struggling for land and agrarian reform that the “Willing buyer, willing seller” approach is hindering accelerated land reform, we need to develop concrete alternative policy options. We should use these options for debate amongst ourselves, as well as a basis for engagement with government. For the SACP, such policy options must be firmly located within the goals of the people’s Charter, which demands that “Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger; The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers; Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land; All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose; People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished.”
Correctly, all of us have identified the following as the main & problematic features of the land reform programme:
These problems impose a challenge on progressive forces: What policy alternatives & options do the rural poor and landless respond with on these issues? In addition, other key strategic issues include:
Part of the alternatives must include attention on the land demand in its urban dimensions. Analysts have observed that municipalities do not integrate land reform objectives in their spatial, developmental and economic planning. We need to consider how to link urban and peri-urban struggles to our campaign in the countryside. Areas to consider are – cooperative purchasing of food and fair-price grocery outlets relying on small farm producers; campaigns around food prices directed against the hegemony of agribusiness and major retailers; and food garden and cooperative projects in townships in line with the objective of food security and sustainable livelihoods. In addition, the question of urban land for housing needs and general urban land usage to be strongly factored into our campaign, within the context of building housing co-operatives. We must also look at urban informal settlements and urban poor settlements in the inner cities and related problems: densification, title deeds, high rise buildings, and body cooperates. All these raise the need for strong local people’s organisations on the ground and access to basic and essential services.
But how do we move forward to address these challenges? Obviously, the rural poor and the landless must be at the core of finding solutions & alternatives.
6. THE WAY FORWARD
Building People’s Land Committees
In local areas, our Party is already working on the ground with churches, land rights organisations, women’s groups & small farmers on local land and agrarian demands & issues. These local initiatives must now be taken into areas where they do not exist in the form of local People’s Land Committees (PLCs). These PLCs must aim to bring together farm workers, youth, women, small farmers, and agricultural co-ops (where they exist) so that they can learn from each other, formulate local demands and actions, strategise and struggle together. We think of these PLCs as a local forum and space for motive forces for land and agrarian reform to unite a wide range of strata in local areas including the landless poor, existing agricultural committees, farm workers, rural women, rural youth, existing Communal Property Associations, rural & land organisations, co-operatives, etc. These PLCs must also sustain mobilisation & act as a base for consciousness building, capacity building, strategising, planning, networking, mobilisation of resources & ongoing action engaging government, farmers, traditional leaders, etc.
In other words, these PLCs are the basis for building popular local centres of people’s power are best placed to drive land and agrarian reform in favour of the workers and the poor. These PLCs are the basis for genuine coalitions of the landless and other strata for pro-poor land and agrarian reform in local areas, districts, provinces and nationally. Building these PLCs is a critical task for the branches and districts of the SACP this year and beyond. The SACP sees the PLCs as laying a basis and reaching to people on ground.
Organising farm workers into trade unions
An important challenge remains that of the organisation of farm workers into trade unions. The SACP will during the first quarter of this year hold a bilateral discussion with FAWU on how to harmonise our land and agrarian reform campaign with the organisation of farm workers into the trade union movement. This struggle should also be coupled with the struggle for the expansion of justice centres in the rural areas. Our structures at all levels will be engaging with government and other para-legal institutions on this matter.
However, the 15 October meeting emphasised that the issue of unionising farm workers and mentioned the difficulties that people were experiencing getting access to farms and to speak to farm workers. In most provinces farms poses one of the greatest threats to field workers and trade union organisers’ lives. Government agencies (local police, magistrates, Department of Labour, etc.) must take part of the blame for creating such an environment which informs the arrogance of farmers. The same October meeting identified possible solutions as including:
Other strata
We have also made a call to traditional leaders, the National African Farmers Union (NAFU) and other small black farmers to join in with us in this struggle. Many members of NAFU are struggling to access and own land and are effectively barred from beneficial economic activities by the structure of the agricultural industry and markets. Their interests will be best served by joining together in the struggle for the thoroughgoing and sustainable land and agrarian reform.
Overall practical tasks
To summarise, the overall practical tasks are:
We would however like to suggest that today’s meeting must discuss and agree on the following issues:
1. Agree on a minimum platform to take forward the struggle for land and agrarian transformation
2. Discuss and agree on matters to be raised with AgriSA and what we want to achieve out of that meeting
3. Appoint a Steering Committee to drive the minimum platform and co-ordinate our work on a day to day basis