President Cyril Ramaphosa says reconciliation in South Africa must include ‘healing the wounds of the past by restoring the land and the wealth to all the people’.
Ramaphosa said at a Reconciliation Day event in Bergville: ‘We know that unless we move with speed to address the unresolved business of nation-building, true reconciliation and unity will be difficult to achieve. This is clearly demonstrated in access to and ownership of land.’
The president said reconciliation was about ‘acknowledging that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity’. This meant all were ‘equal citizens … with an equal claim to being South African’.
But, ‘if all the people in this country, black and white, can call this place home, then it is essential that all its people must share equally in the land, the resources, the wealth and the opportunity in South Africa.
‘Reconciliation is therefore also about healing the wounds of the past by restoring the land and the wealth to all the people, and realising the rights of all South Africans to dignity, security and comfort.’
Ramaphosa went on: ‘Right here in Bergville is a stark example of the necessity of transforming patterns of land ownership for the benefit of our people. This town is the centre of a dairy and cattle ranching area and plays an important role in the economy of the province and the country.
‘But skewed patterns of racial ownership have played out here for centuries, where communities and subsistence farmers were removed from their ancestral land to make way for white-owned commercial farms.’
The ‘story of land dispossession in this province is indeed a painful one, and mirrors the lived experiences of millions of our people across this country’.
‘It is the priority of this government to accelerate the process of land reform, and in doing so we will be guided by the decisions of our Parliament and recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform.’
He called on ‘private landowners, commercial farmers and the private sector to take proactive steps to accelerate the land reform process by supporting farmworkers and communities to acquire land and to farm it’.
Ramaphosa also acknowledged the practical commitment of ordinary South Africans to reconciliation, noting: ‘We see evidence of national reconciliation in ordinary stories shared by our people … We will not allow the prophets of doom to tell us that we are worse off than before 1994, or that race relations have deteriorated.’
[Picture: Diriye Amey, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38362928]