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JOHANNESBURG - South Africa has seized its first farm in the clearest indication yet that it is bowing to growing pressure to redistribute land to majority blacks.
Black pressure groups and trade unions have been threatening to begin invading farms unless the Government moved quickly to redistribute land.
Among many of South Africa's 50,000-plus white commercial farmers, this first land expropriation by President Thabo Mbeki's Government echoes Robert Mugabe's violent land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe where at least 4000 farmers have been evicted from their land, leading to the collapse of that country's economy.
But among blacks dispossessed of their land in 300 years of apartheid, the move marks the beginning of a new era to correct unsustainably skewed land ownership patterns.
White farmers and white dominated groups still control 90 per cent of prime farmland while blacks remain crowded in barren communal areas.
South African authorities have hitherto moved cautiously on land reform, fearing that any forced seizures will rattle investors afraid of a repeat of a Zimbabwe-style situation.
Yet there is also growing recognition that equity in land landownership within a reasonable time is unachievable without resort to some "strong arm" tactics to dispossess landowners who will not easily give up what they have already amassed.
The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said yesterday that the first expropriation order of the gigantic 25,200ha farm owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa in the Northern Cape Province came into effect on January 26. The Government will take full possession of the farm for black resettlement next month.
The Government has paid NZ$5.9 million for the land although the church - which has described the seizure as a "very negative move" - had wanted more than $14 million which it says is the value of the land.
The fact that Mbeki's Government is paying for the land has at least mollified analysts who deem it unfair to compare South Africa's land reform with Zimbabwe's which does not involve compensation. "The fact that this Government pays compensation and respects the rule of law in land reform and everything else defines the difference between South Africa and Mugabe's methods," said agricultural expert Lazarus Sebeko.
Maans Nel, spokesman of the main Opposition Democratic Alliance, said his party's position was that the state should only resort to expropriation as a last resort where negotiations with landowners would have totally failed.
"There are a lot of other ways to get land ... At least 4 per cent of land or 4 million ha are coming on the open market every year and the Government should as much as possible buy land on the open market."
The Government has recently hardened its stance, accusing white farmers of being uncooperative and frustrating negotiations by demanding high prices for land.
Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana announced last year that she was setting a six-month deadline for price negotiations with farmers after which any targeted farms would be expropriated either for restitution or resettlement.
Xingwana has recently been engaged in harsh verbal exchanges with the white farmers after accusing some of them of sexually abusing farm workers and treating them like slaves. The Government's critics, however, say white recalcitrance is not the only reason for delays in reallocating land. Bureaucratic sluggishness is also to blame for dragging out the negotiations, often for years.
The church farm has been expropriated under a land restitution law which allows blacks evicted from their ancestral lands during apartheid to apply to have their rights restored or to ask for financial compensation.
The church's land was claimed by 471 local families, among them farm workers. But the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represents most white farmers, is against expropriation of land.
- INDEPENDENT
