This is the IRR’s response to a New York Times article last month – ‘Why South Africa Can’t Avoid Land Reforms’ – which the newspaper has declined to publish.
The hold that ‘the land question’ has over political imaginings of South Africa is profound. It has been elevated to the forefront of South Africa’s politics, and brought dire warnings that a failure to resolve it will bring imminent ruin.
Professor Mahmoud Mamdani’s New York Times article Why South Africa Can’t Avoid Land Reforms on 17 June is an example of this.
His article paints a picture of land as the foundational issue of South Africa’s economic and social malaise, the object of a nascent uprising and the spur to much needed state action on the matter.
The evidence does not support this. Land reform, certainly in the agrarian sense, has never been a dominant concern for the country.
It does not rank prominently among the concerns of ordinary people. There is a great deal of polling data on this. For example, polling conducted for the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in late 2018, found that only 2% of South Africans – and 2% of black Africans – regarded land reform as the issue to which government should accord top priority. The government has typically allocated less than 1% of the national budget to it.
Even after enjoying enormous attention over the past eighteen months, it was notable just how subdued land was as a campaign issue in the recent elections.
This is understandable. South Africa is now two-thirds urbanised, an irreversible process. A former minister responsible for land reform commented some time back that he had been surprised to see many potential beneficiaries of land reform turning down offers of land, and opting for financial compensation. He ruefully conceded that ‘we no longer have a peasantry; we have wage earners now.’
South Africans increasingly see their futures in the country’s urban centres, earning a living in the industrial and services economy, with opportunities for mobility for themselves and their children. In poll after poll, employment is identified as the key need – 26% of respondents to the IRR’s 2018 poll felt that ‘creating more jobs’ should be government’s top priority. Indeed, it is correct to note that the demand for land is ‘increasingly urban’. That is part of a complex of issues relating to urbanisation, of which land is but one part.
It is mistaken to understand what is underway in South Africa as only or even predominantly about land, and certainly not about land as an economic asset. Rather, this has much to do with deflecting attention from the failures of governance and development efforts for well over a decade. This includes economic growth crawling along at 1% per year (dismal compared to other emerging markets), an unemployment rate of close to 28%, and an education system that is failing to prepare most of the country’s youth for meaningful economic participation. Probably more importantly, it also speaks to the ideological predispositions of the country’s ruling African National Congress (ANC).
The heightened attention to land reform has arisen because of the path to which the ANC is committed, the idea that it will be driven through a regime of Expropriation without Compensation (EWC). This represents merely the latest – albeit perhaps most brazen – move on property rights by the ANC. We at the IRR have traced more than two dozen attempts since 2008 to introduce policy changes, laws and regulations that would degrade the protection of private property and expand the state’s discretion to intrude. Not all of these have been about land.
EWC, incidentally, does little to deal with the failings of land reform. It assumes that compensation is a major stumbling block, and while it is often claimed that farmers are engaging in price-gouging, concrete examples of this are few. One of the most comprehensive investigations into the failings of land reform, commissioned by Parliament and led by a former president, noted: ‘Experts advise that the need to pay compensation has not been the most serious constraint on land reform in South Africa to date – other constraints, including increasing evidence of corruption by officials, the diversion of the land reform budget to elites, lack of political will, and lack of training and capacity have proved more serious stumbling blocks to land reform.’
EWC is rather an expression of a deeply ideological statist impulse on the part of the ANC. This orientation has long existed in land policy. It is, for example, policy not to transfer ownership of redistributed land (arguably the most important element of the land reform programme), but rather to retain it as state property while keeping its beneficiaries as tenants. Another suggestion floated for some years is for all land to be vested in the state.
Other proposals – such as mandatory investments by retirement funds, probably to underwrite South Africa’s mismanaged state-owned enterprises, and the nationalisation of the country’s central bank – speak to a similar mindset.
The EWC drive raises disturbing questions about South Africa’s political and constitutional future. In pursuit of it, the ANC and others are determined to amend the country’s Bill of Rights – the first amendment since it was adopted, and despite confident claims by ANC leaders that the constitution’s current provisions allow for EWC under specific circumstances. The precedent this would set is chilling.
In essence, Professor Mamdani’s warning that ‘in the absence of a credible response to the land question, the ANC’s fear of populism and demagogy is likely to come true’ is misplaced: the ANC is largely the source of these.
Given the depth of the pathologies afflicting the South African state, all of these are concerning prospects. They are profoundly dissuasive to investors, domestic and foreign.
However, land reform is needed. Land politics evokes painful historical memories, and land reform has an important moral dimension. Properly executed, it could provide useful economic gains – although even a highly successful programme will not be transformative to the society. Miscarried, the damages inflicted would be dire, undermining food security and, equally seriously, South Africa’s tenuous balance-of-payments position, along with whatever investor confidence remains. Badly executed land reform will take down more than the farming sector.
Getting it right demands a realistic appreciation of the risks and benefits, and a sober assessment of what will be required to carry it out. Key here will be reforming the state to perform its obligations with something approaching professionalism and competence, and with a long-term view of the country’s prospects for development and prosperity. This will require an effective education system, an investor friendly environment, well maintained infrastructure. It will also demand respect for, indeed extending, property rights, rather than abridging them. This applies to land both in urban and in rural contexts. The necessary material resources and expertise largely exist, or could be found, if only they were harnessed correctly. South Africa’s shaky governance systems are at present not conducive to doing so.
Ideological fixations – which misstate the issues, entertaining delusions as solutions – will be deleterious. South Africa’s history is a warning against them.
Terence Corrigan is a project manager at the Institute of Race Relations.
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