Land Matters: South Africa's Failed Land Reforms and the Road Ahead by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi

Author:Tembeka Ngcukaitobi [Ngcukaitobi, Tembeka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Africa, South, Republic of South Africa, political science, Public Policy, General
ISBN: 9781776095964
Google: -WhczgEACAAJ
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2021-06-04T23:31:51.375183+00:00

The future of the willing seller

So far we have considered the failed land redistribution programme. It has not failed because it is market-driven. It has failed despite its fundamental adherence to market-based solutions. A greater reliance on market ‘forces’ simply lacks any credibility. Our fixation with market-based solutions has not produced the desired results.

The solution, however, is not to replace an imperfect market with equally imperfect state institutions. When Mike Mlengana, the most senior official at the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, resigned from his position in 2020, Farmer’s Weekly reported that his reasons for resigning included

ongoing large-scale and widespread inefficiencies at all levels within the agriculture department; the department’s current structures and human capital not being geared for effective implementation of plans to develop and support South Africa’s agriculture sector; an ‘absolute lack of delivery knowledge and work ethic’ at all levels within the agriculture department; and the department’s leadership often voicing the will to tackle corruption, but then failing to hold each other accountable for this.28

This view confirms what many commentators have said all along. In 2013 Cousins cited the ‘inability of land reform officials to engage in planning to support the productive use of transferred land, or to critically assess the plans drawn up for beneficiaries by consultants’ as two of the key reasons for the overall failure in land reform.29 He asked if it was ‘credible, then, that officials will be able to undertake the varied and technically complex tasks required of them by the new policies’. His answer was that they couldn’t, at least in the short term. Yet he was not willing to allow for a wholly market-driven approach. This was because ‘market forces on their own tend to privilege the better-off’. This is true, as only deliberate interventions in favour of the poor will ensure we have a land reform programme that fulfils its potential to help address poverty and inequality. For this to happen, however, we need a capable state guided by a commitment to ending structural injustice. To do this, the state must also combat corruption.

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