It is trite to say that media coverage is often not merely intended to report on events and to inform an audience, but to structure how those audiences interpret what has transpired. Call this narrative creation. Following President Trump’s remarks on South Africa, we’ve seen a great deal of this, of which Tim Cocks’s pieces (“Trump’s threat to South Africa over land – what’s behind it?”, 3 February, and “The stark divide that South Africa’s land act seeks to bridge”, 10 February) are examples.
Narratives depend not only on what information is presented, but on how it’s presented, in relation to what, and what is left out. Thus, in presenting – or justifying? – the new Expropriation Act, Cocks refers to “white landowners who still possess three quarters of SA’s freehold farmland”, contrasting this with “4% owned by blacks.”
These numbers invariably provoke outrage, feeding the belief that “nothing has changed” since 1994. Indeed, this is what they are deployed to do, as they have been repeated since 2018. But they are misleading.
This 72%-4% split (land held by coloured, Indian and “other” landowners is ignored) refers to freehold land held by individuals and registered at the deeds office. Commendably, Cocks acknowledges the “freehold” qualifier. But such land amounts to only a third of the total in the country (not all being farmland in the sense of agricultural units). It is the only land in respect of which the race of the owner could be identified.
Most land is held by trusts (24%), the state (22%), companies (19%), community-based organisations (3%) and co-ownership schemes (1%). Revealingly, the 72%-4% focus erases the modest land reform successes that have been achieved, since this tends to happen through community rather than individual schemes. It also bypasses acknowledging that the land to which black people have historically had access – the erstwhile homelands – has been state property and remains so, three decades after the transition.
Misrepresenting the facts in this way is useful for building a suitable narrative around why the state needs ever more extensive powers to discipline the recalcitrant. As Cocks comments, many accuse “white landowners of hoarding”. But he bases his narrative on an incomplete and less-than-candid appraisal of the circumstances.
Indeed, if freehold is to be the standard – and we at the Institute of Race Relations have much sympathy for this – it needs to be recorded that there has been enormous official resistance to this idea. This was expressed unambiguously in early 2018, during the parliamentary debate that set off an investigation into amending the constitution to facilitate Expropriation without Compensation, when the then Minister of Land Affairs made it clear that titling was off the table. Rather, he said that “a progressive revolutionary government ought to then have land and allocate it to people.”
Beneficiaries of the expropriation drive would, in effect, remain tenants of the state. And so they generally have. The extant circumstances arise from deliberate choices made since the transition as well as the tragic preexisting history.
All of which raises the point made by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, that the Act is intended to be part of the process of delivering an “economic emancipation [that] was not fulfilled.” One cannot but note that this state of affairs reflects infinitely more than the distribution of land. It reflects an economy growing at a fraction of the rate of its emerging market peers, depressed investment and a raft of governance failures. It is counterintuitive to imagine that empowering an incapacitated state to undermine property rights holds out any prospect of delivering that emancipation.
Of course, one is free to argue for the erosion of property rights in South Africa. But informed debate requires an appreciation of the full realities, however inconvenient they may be to any given narrative.
* This article was offered to, but not used by, Reuters. In an emailed response to the IRR, signed “The Reuters.com Team”, the news agency said: “We appreciate your interest in publication by Reuters of IRR’s response to recent articles by Tim Cocks. Reuters does not publish opinion pieces. Thanks for thinking of us.”
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