Land redistribution will be a crucial question for the incoming majority government in South Africa after the April 27 elections. The secretary general of the African National Congress, Cyril Ramaphosa, gave the opening address to the Conference on Land Redistribution Options held in Johannesburg from October 12 to 15. We publish his remarks below, slightly abridged.
The oldest continuing call of the ANC is Mayibuye iAfrika! — Come back, Africa. The dispossession of the majority must come to an end. South Africa must belong not just to one group or another, but to all of us.
Unless we settle the land question, we do not have a country. If we handle it badly, we tear South Africa to pieces. If we manage it well, we create the foundations for a truly united nation.
The massively unequal distribution of land is not just the unfortunate legacy of apartheid; it is the totally unacceptable continuation of apartheid. Whoever owns the land is in effect the master or mistress of the people on the land. Unless we solve the land question, we cannot solve the human question, we cannot de-racialise the economy and we cannot achieve a secure legal regime for property rights respected by all.
Just as the inequality did not come about by itself, so it will not go away of its own accord. We need an active policy to deal with it, one that is as fair as the previous one was unfair, as participatory as the earlier one was dictatorial, as balanced as the former one was partial. The goal must not be to divide South Africans, but to unite us and to introduce new standards of fairness into public life.
Ever since it was founded, the ANC has put three central items on the agenda: the vote, land and education. These three demands are to be found in the country's first Bill of Rights, put forward by the ANC in 1923, they are repeated in the ANC's Bill of Rights in 1943, in the Freedom Charter of 1955, in the Constitutional Principles of 1987 and in our current Bill of Rights proposals as well as the document "Ready to Govern" adopted at our policy conference last year.
By 1993, we have all but won the right to vote. Now we must direct all our attentions to ensuring that the vote is meaningful. The first elections are in sight. The fact that they are about to be held is the greatest triumph yet for democracy in our land.
Yet the elections will not be held simply for the sake of proving to the world that we are democratic. Nor is their main function merely to change the colour of skin of those in office. Our objective is not and can never be just to de-racialise oppression and make injustice more acceptable.
Mandates
We go into the elections seeking two clear mandates from the people of our country. In the first place, we wish for a mandate as to the kind of constitution the people want. Secondly, we look for a mandate in respect of the program of reconstruction that we will embark upon as the leading participant in a government of national unity and reconstruction.
One of the key elements in this program will be land reform. It is vital that land reform be undertaken in a meaningful way, that it be principled and effective.
While everybody has a contribution to make in resolving the land question, we in the ANC have a special responsibility. The claim to restore land rights is part of our history. If we turn our backs on the land question, we are no longer the ANC.
Most of us in the leadership have an urban bias. We belong to the towns and have a deep sense of involvement with the urgent problems of three cities. The land question appears so difficult, so laden with emotion, so ridden with layers of competing interests, that we always wait for a more convenient moment to deal with it. Now is never the time. There are always seemingly good reasons for avoiding the land question: we do not want to rock the constitutional boat; we must give priority to putting new governmental structures in place; we must first get the economy going.
The fact is that there is never a good time to deal with difficult matters. The land question will always have too much history locked into it, too much symbolism, too much economic impact, too much passion, too much blood. Yet, even if we wished to run away from the land question, the question would never run away from us. We have to deal with it, and now. The question is not whether to face up to the issue, but how.
Inequality
Dispossession and denial of rights to land have resulted in the present unequal division of land and landlessness, which will require legislative intervention far beyond the mere repeal of apartheid land laws. Our policies must provide access to land both as a productive resource and to ensure that all citizens have a secure place to live.
The crippling impact of past policies demands the urgent implementation of a national program of land reform and distribution. At the same time, we must take account of the need to maintain food supplies and to provide equitable and orderly procedures so as to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible.
The legacy of forced removals and dispossession must be addressed as a fundamental point of departure to any future land policy for our country. Effective measures to ensure that landless people gain access to land on fair terms, and a legal process to resolve competing claims to land, will be introduced by an ANC government as a matter of priority.
The development of a productive agriculture sector and a viable rural economy is necessary for the economic growth and well-being of all South Africans. The productive potential of the land and the people living on it should be effectively harnessed, for the benefit of the entire nation. Our agricultural land should be treated as a fragile and precious resource base which belongs to future generations, and our policies will ensure its enrichment, protection and productive utilisation as a foundation for food production.
Quite apart from the legitimate anger of our people over decades of dispossession and impoverishment, there are several hard-headed economic imperatives for tackling rural restructuring. The first is the large opportunity for increasing productive employment, a crucial objective that will be difficult to create in any other sector. Secondly, there is the uncomfortable historical fact that such claims do not go away, but fester into decades of debilitating conflict and war. Thirdly, 20 years of haphazard government policy on agriculture have led to poor performance and environmental degradation in the large farm sector. We [will] vigorously pursue a policy of learning how to support small farm households to make them more productive.
But we need to be circumspect in our approach. There have been too many failures in land reform, as well as immense successes. Let us learn from both.
Redistribution
The starting point is in restoring rights to those who were forcibly removed from their land under apartheid laws. But more widely we also need to address problems of poverty, malnutrition and unemployment through a redistribution of land.
The establishment of locally based land committees and land claims courts will provide a path through which the existing conflicts over specific land may be equitably resolved. This process has the potential of restoring faith in a system of legally recognised land rights.
More specifically, we aim to empower the dispossessed to actively claim their lost lands. Empowered with the right of restoration, claimants may either have their land restored or, in the case where restoration would be inappropriate, may negotiate for the allocation of alternative land or compensation.
From this platform, we send out a message to the white farming community who own 83% of the land, and who completely dominate the commercial farming sector. Some of you welcome change, many of you see it as an inevitable necessity that has to be faced up to, and some of you wish to resist. To all of you we say the following:
We are all South Africans. We all love the land. We all have invested our sweat in the soil. We all rejoice when crops grow and livestock prospers. We feel the drought and the hails and the pests together. We are all stricken by the erosion and sandstorms that denude our soil.
The land is the common heritage of all of us. Here we are born, here we live, and here we die. Four decades ago, we declared in the Freedom Charter that South Africa belonged to all who lived in it. We have never deviated from this policy, and now that we are achieving the principal goals of the Freedom Charter, we certainly do not intend departing from them. The problem that faces all of us is that this shared belonging is neither a social nor a legal reality.
History in this phase gives us all a special chance to work together to bring about the reality of a shared enjoyment of a shared birthright. Land reform will be so much easier and swifter, and the outcome so much more to mutual advantage, if we work on it together.