Banks in South Africa have lent farmers about R 150 billion and have in excess of R 1.3 trillion outstanding on property loans overall.

This is according to Banking Association of South Africa head Cas Coovadia.

South Africans will have to wait another two months before they know whether the Constitution should be amended to allow for land to be expropriated without compensation. 

South Africa's land reforms will include issuing title deeds to small-scale farmers living on tribal lands, a senior ANC official said on Friday. This is a comment that will rile the traditional chiefs.

Late on August 22, US President Donald Trump launched into some trademark Twitter diplomacy. After apparently watching a segment on Fox News, the President felt moved to instruct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South African land farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers.”

Newsroom editors scratched their heads. State Department officials scrambled.

The South African government, which had spent months gingerly navigating the Trump presidency, swiftly hit back. Officials called the tweet “unfortunate” and “divisive” and hauled in the US Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires for a dressing down.

South Africa is engaged in an intense debate about equitable land ownership and righting the wrongs of a racist past. The government wants to allow land expropriation without compensation in some cases.

But why, after barely touching on African issues during his administration, had the American president chosen to focus on a domestic debate in South Africa?

And, more importantly, how had the fate of a few thousand white South African farmers become a regular feature on Trump’s favored Fox News?

South Africa has become a twisted meme for the far right online. A favorite for extreme right-wingers like Katie Hopkins, a British provocateur, and Laura Southern, a Canadian alternative media personality, who have developed a substantial following.

There is no shortage of extreme voices on South Africa. Posts about white genocide and land grabs are everywhere on Facebook or YouTube.

Spend a little time, though, in this alternative media universe, and the name of one South African will keep cropping up: Simon Roche.

Roche is ubiquitous, doing interviews with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and ultra-right media like Red Ice, or appealing directly to his followers on social media from an overstuffed leather couch.

“Hello I’m Simon Roche. We represent the white people of South Africa, who are presently being told that they can expect to see a genocide against them,” says Roche in a fundraising post. The video has more than 800,000 views.

He is the public face and a leader of the Suidlanders, roughly translated from Afrikaans as Southerners or South Landers. The Suidlanders believe South Africa is heading toward a brutal race war where whites will be targeted by blacks.

Their members come from across the country, and from a cross-section of society. They are farmers, business people, and suburbanites, organized into more than 30 districts across the country. What unites them is their race -- they are exclusively white -- and their genuine belief in their founder’s doomsday prophecy.

The Suidlanders are planning for the evacuation of their members to rural South African refugee camps they will set up.

“I don’t think it is racism. I don’t get up in the morning hating black people”

There is a key distinction between the Suidlanders and South Africa’s khaki-clad hate groups of the past like the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or Boeremag that focused on aggressive nationalism.

The Suidlanders cast themselves as victims and they push that myth far beyond South Africa’s shores.

“The online strategy and propaganda of the Suidlanders uses the same tactics as terrorist groups for recruiting members,” says an official of a South African intelligence agency who is not authorized to talk publicly.

The Suidlanders claim their membership is now more than 130,000 strong. That figure is most likely inflated, says our source, but something impossible to verify since they do not keep membership lists.

The South African government is concerned enough, though, to have undercover agents embedded inside the group, according to the source.

Ultra-right-wing groups have always had some appeal to fringe elements in South Africa. The ongoing land debate has given oxygen to the myth of white victimization like never before.

With the Suidlanders
Down a dirt road, and through the cracked fields of corn husks, a perfect circle of imposing green eucalyptus trees rises over the parched early-summer farmland.

The ring of trees is the exact dimension of the circle of wagons during the Battle of Blood River on December 16, 1838, where a few hundred Afrikaaners defeated thousands of Zulu fighters without losing a single life.

Inside SUVs and pickups and camper vans, families set up their tents and gather in small groups chatting, shielded from the outside world by the trees.

The Suidlanders’ newest district organization is on a camping weekend -- and they agreed to let us come.
The Suidlanders’ camping weekend ends with a raffle where winning numbers are chosen with a bit of target practice. - Brent Swails/CNN
A whistle sounds and about 50 men, women and children filter into a corrugated iron hall. On the stage are flipcharts with handwritten lists in Afrikaans.

“Suidlanders – Ezekiel 20:45,” one is headed.

“The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, set your face toward the south,’” the biblical prophecy reads. “I am about to set fire to you, and it will consume all your trees both green and dry.”

Jan Fourie, a ramrod-straight man with a black beard arching along his jawline, stands in front of the group holding a dog-eared family bible.

“You can see how the revolutionary climate is growing in our land. When the anarchy breaks out, we will flee. Moses was one man and he got his people out. You are all like Moses now,” he says in crisp, formal Afrikaans.

The Suidlanders prepare themselves with survival and weapons training. Their leaders are setting up radio repeaters on farms for when the cell network fails.

It will fail, Fourie -- a district leader of the Suidlanders -- tells members, because the war is imminent -- and they will be the victims.


“You need to be prepared for the bomb throwers,” says Fourie, referring to black South Africans. “If you want to just tag along with us, then you are a traitor. I started giving these lessons to my daughter when she was 7 years old. When she was 16 she came to me and said she was getting nightmares. But we need to be prepared.”

Later, Fourie demonstrates what to pack in a grab bag.

One by one, he pulls out the necessities of life on the run from a black rucksack: small bible; compass; maps; backgammon boards; first-aid supplies; any necessary medications; penknife; whistle; playing cards.

“Along with your grab bag, you always need your licensed weapon, your licensed ammunition and your weapon-cleaning materials,” insists Fourie.
Jan Fourie demonstrates what to pack in a grab bag. - Brent Swails/CNN
The Suidlanders are careful to do everything by the book because they know the authorities are watching.

“We are constantly monitoring the Suidlanders to see if they change tactics or step out of the confines of the law. Should they do this, then we will move on them,” says the intelligence official.

At sunset, the wind whips in, flattening some tents. Thunder and sheet lightning rush in from the West, pelting the campers with rain and hail.

“We are going to eat like kings tonight, in spite of the weather,” says Simon Roche, stepping under an awning and poking his fire with a stick.

“Are you guys alright?” he says in Afrikaans through the deluge to a couple shivering in their two-person tent.

“Yes! … No!” they shout in unison.

Roche leans back on a camp chair and ruminates.

“Ten years ago, we were preparing even then to implement a civil defense plan to safeguard the welfare of our people in the event of a civil war in which our people are threatened. We are further along the timeline,” he says.

“What would you say to the white South Africans that aren’t paying attention to this threat?” I ask him.

“We think they are going to be caught in an almighty cauldron of conflict.”

“There is no evidence that a group of people are killing farmers for political purposes”

Gareth Newham of the Institute of Security Studies (ISS)
Roche talks fast, switching between meandering white supremacist philosophy and lengthy personal anecdotes.

He says the land debate has been a boon for the Suidlanders.

And he praises Donald Trump’s tweet about the matter. “We saw a ray of hope. Maybe there are people out there who know and care and have power and influence. Only time will tell how much is smoke and mirrors -- shadows and dust.”

One of his favorite topics, though, is his recent tour of the US.

“We toured for six months last year. The thing that struck us was the classiness of the people who attended our talks,” he says. “They are not your radical neo-Nazi kind of people. In venue after venue, in presentation after presentation, we met sterling young guys -- great guys -- magnificent manners.”

Both sides
You may remember the people he is talking about from Charlottesville, Virginia, and the August 2017 Unite the Right rally.

Thousands of white supremacists descended on the historic college town, prompting clashes between hate groups and counter-protesters. A young woman was killed when a neo-Nazi mowed her down with his Dodge Challenger.

“Jews will not replace us,” was a favorite chant at the rally.

The images of those hate groups on the streets of America are still raw, beamed onto phones, televisions and computers around the world.

One of the frames an Associated Press photographer filed that day is packed with Unite the Right protesters holding makeshift weapons and flags: Confederate, American and Nazi.

In the far bottom right of the image, a Unite the Right protester wearing a hard hat and protective glasses has a wide grin. An anonymous face in a sea of racists.

But not anonymous to Carla Hill, an investigator with the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who actively tracks white supremacist hate groups.

A few days later, President Trump faced reporters. Flanked by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who is Jewish, Trump doubled down on his earlier comments about Charlottesville, when he equated white supremacists with counter protesters.

“I do think there's blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides and I have no doubt about it,” Trump said.

Asked about the neo-Nazis specifically, Trump returned to the theme: “You have some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

Roche sent a giddy audio message to the Suidlanders from Charlottesville.

“I wish I was American because I would have smacked... I don’t know how many, but a good few of them needed a hiding. The guys did a superb job,” Roche says in his voice note, referring to the beatings meted out to counter-protesters, “The people behaved themselves respectfully and decently.”

Investigators from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the ADL in the US say that the Suidlanders and other South African right-wing organizations are successfully taking their storyline of white victimhood to the US.
 
“American white supremacists support Roche, because they have a long fixation with South Africa as a possible model. A microcosm of what is possible in the United States. They link the fate of white people in the United States to that of white South Africans,” says the ADL’s Hill.

Hill says that multiple groups in the US use South Africa as a wedge issue, trying to demonize all black South Africans to get more people to join their cause.

Heidi Beirich, the director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, agrees. Her team monitors scores of hate groups in America and closely follows the Suidlanders.

“It is this idea that white people are the victims instead of the aggressors of these processes. But, of course, you have to sell that narrative. You want to be the victim, you don’t want to be the aggressor, or you will get no sympathy. It is like Holocaust deniers trying to minimize the genocide of Jews to salvage Hitler’s ideas,” she says.

Ethnic cleansing
But how do South African groups cast themselves as victims? After all, the apartheid government was a notorious aggressor.

To understand, you need to drive around about two-and-a-half hours north of Johannesburg, where private citizens have erected a striking monument. Hundreds of white crosses – each with a name, date and age -- form a giant cross on the slope. The date on each cross is the day each person was murdered.

Large white letters fixed to the mountainside spell out “Plaasmoorde” or “Farm Murders.”

The monument has two aims: show how many white farmers have been murdered and give names to the victims -- who often barely get a mention in the local press.
Large white letters fixed to the mountainside spell out “Plaasmoorde” or “Farm Murders” next to a major highway two and a half hours from Johannesburg. -

“A systematic process of ethnic cleansing is a looming threat in South Africa,” says Ernst Roets, the deputy chief executive of AfriForum, a lobbying group.

Roets sits in his office at Afriforum headquarters in Centurion near Johannesburg. A library of political tomes, including Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom,” is joined by a small bust of Ronald Reagan adorning the wall behind him.

AfriForum caters mostly, but not exclusively, to Afrikaaners. It fashions itself as a minority civil rights group -- the minority being white South Africans.

AfriForum organizes protests and releases slick videos on social media that give horrifying details of farm attacks. Roets is a constant presence in the news media in South Africa.

The biggest problem with AfriForum’s claims about possible ethnic cleansing and farm murders is that they are not true, says Gareth Newham of the Institute of Security Studies (ISS), a South African research group.

“There is no evidence to support that. There is no evidence that a group of people are killing farmers for political purposes. There is no evidence that they are doing it because they are listening to political leaders. It is happening because of crime,” says Newham.

Newham and the ISS independently track farm murders -- as well as all other serious crimes. Farmers’ unions like AgriSA also keep stats on farm murders. Both say that farm murders peaked in 2001, at around 130 killings per year. Currently, farm murders are less than half that number.
 
There were 62 murders on farms in the 2017-18 financial year, according to official police statistics, or around 0.3% of the 20,336 murders in South Africa during the same period.

“There is no epidemic of farm murders in South Africa. There is an epidemic of murders,” Newham says.

More people are killed in taxi violence, in gang violence, by vigilante mobs than in farm murders. More cops are killed. And rises in farm murders are in line with the overall increases in murder rates.

But Newham says that even on a proportional basis, AfriForum’s arguments aren’t valid.

Despite the facts outlined by the ISS, Roets insists farmers are killed in disproportionate numbers in South Africa and that government leaders and some black South African politicians are complicit, citing the incendiary remarks of Julius Malema, the leader of radical opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters.

Malema has been charged with hate speech for singing a struggle song called “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer.” Now he substitutes “kill” with “kiss.”

In June, Malema was criticized after telling a Turkish TV station that he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people for now.”

In an interview with CNN, Malema didn’t row back from those comments.

“No, no, I said I am not calling for the slaughter of white people for now. I will not be responsible for the future. I don’t know what will be happening in the future,” Malema told CNN.

He denied that he is playing into the hands of groups like AfriForum.

“They hate me for speaking equality. And they cannot imagine themselves being equal to monkeys,” he said.

Dialogue is failing
AfriForum’s assertive stance on land reform and farm murders has swelled the group’s numbers, but it is often ridiculed by the South African government and ordinary citizens on social media.

Roets says that it is increasingly difficult for them to resolve issues through dialogue in South Africa. Not so in America.

“We were very glad that there was a great acceptance of our concerns,” says Roets.

Roets and Kallie Kriel, the head of AfriForum, went on an extensive tour earlier this year through America, meeting political leaders, visiting think tanks and media personalities.

Roets hit the conservative jackpot with an extended interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Months later, another broadcast of Carlson’s likely sparked Trump’s South Africa-related tweet.
 
 
2012
White supremacists in US organize protests
American white supremacist movements -- including neo-Nazis, skinheads, “traditional” white supremacists, Christian Identity adherents and racist prison gangs -- begin making arrangements for “nationwide” demonstrations with the goal of preventing the alleged “genocide of whites” in South Africa, according to research compiled by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism (ADL). The organizers dub their efforts to rally as the “South Africa Project.”
Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images
 
2015
Manifesto of mass shooter reveals white supremacist views
Court documents show Dylann Roof, the man who killed nine people in a massacre at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was obsessed with Rhodesia, a former British colony that was ruled by a white minority until 1980, when its name was changed to Zimbabwe.
Suidlanders Media YouTube
 
2017
Roche tours the US
Simon Roche of the Suidlanders, a white survivalist group that is preparing for a race war in South Africa, spends six months travelling to so-called alt-right conferences in the US. Roche also meets with internet personality Mike Cernovich, known for his role peddling far-right conspiracy theories including “Pizzagate” and Swedish far-right radio host Henrik Palmgren. While in the US, Roche also appears on fringe right-wing media organization InfoWars on several occasions.
Rich Polk/Getty Images for Politicon
 
JUNE, 29 2017
Conservative pundit tweets support
Conservative author Ann Coulter writes “The only real refugees: White South African farmers facing genocide” while retweeting far-right personality Tara McCarthy.
IMDB
 
JANUARY 2018
More right-wing figures propagate ‘white genocide’ narrative
The narrative of an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa is picked up by more far-right figures internationally. It starts with Canadian far-right personality Lauren Southern, who appears in a documentary called “Farmlands” while visiting South Africa. In the footage, she interviews Simon Roche.

MARCH 2018
Carlson discusses South African land reform on show
Fox News host Tucker Carlson raises the issue of a “racist land grab” in South Africa on his nightly show.

 
MARCH 2018
Australian cabinet minister offers support for white SA farmers
Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton calls on his department to explore potentially offering fast-track visas to white South African farmers because they are being "persecuted" and need help from a "civilized" country.
@kalliekriel/Twitter
 
MAY 2018
AfriForum tours the US
On May 16, Fox News host Tucker Carlson discusses “large-scale killing” of farmers with a guest from South Africa white minority lobbying group AfriForum. AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets bumped into National Security Advisor John Bolton while at the Fox News studio and later 
 
AUGUST 22, 2018
Land reform on Fox News again
Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson includes another segment on his show about redistribution of land in South Africa.

 
AUGUST 22, 2018
SA land issues appear on Trump’s account
US President Donald Trump tweets that he has “asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” He then appears to quote Carlson, adding, “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers” before tagging the Fox News host and the network.
“In our view the impact was massive. And we welcomed the tweet. The core of what he said for us is that there is a recognition that there is a problem in South Africa,” says Roets.

In a chance meeting at Fox News, the pair even managed to hand Roets’ book on farm murders to Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, and grab a photo with him.

 
Great turn of events: With a bit of luck @ErnstRoets and I met John Robert Bolton, USA National Security Advisor to @realDonaldTrump. We also gave him a copy of Ernst's new #KillTheBoerBook on #FarmMurders & #ExpropriationWithoutCompensation in SA. @afriforum #AfriForumUSA .

 
543
5:09 PM - May 9, 2018 · Washington, DC
 
457 people are talking about this 
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“They are finding people who get some resonance with what they are saying, and these people are ill-informed about what is happening here,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told CNN in an exclusive interview. “Just as President Trump was ill-informed about the messages that they were beaming out.”

“Those people overseas that are taken in by this message of whites in South Africa being under threat, they are looking at South Africa through the lens of black versus white. And South Africa has long moved away from that.”

AfriForum has been so successful in international lobbying that Australia’s Minister of Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, suggested earlier this year that special visas could be offered for white farmers fleeing South Africa. The group continues to lobby in both the US and Australia.

Heidi Beirich of the SPLC calls Roets and AfriForum white supremacists “in a suit and tie.”

“There are two versions here of white supremacy. A more ‘white-collar’ and a less ‘white-collar’ version. Both are penetrating into the psyche. And once Trump put out that tweet, attention was drawn to this theory of white South African farmers being put under attack like never before,” says Beirich.

“There is no impending apocalypse for white people. This is stoking fears amongst whites as well as impacting voting, elections, views of multiculturalism. Frankly, it is just leading to more racism and hate.”

Roets and Afriforum flatly deny that they are white supremacists. And Roets says the use of farm murders by these groups bothers him.

“There are people who try to make a propaganda issue out of farm murders and try to portray it as something that it isn’t,” he says -- something Roets himself is accused of doing frequently.

“You can compare where South Africa is today to where other countries where ethnic cleansing took place just two or three years before it happened. I am not saying that we are at that point, but to try to deny that it is a possibility is very naive,” he says.

Hutus with more guns
The sky has cleared by dawn and the Suidlanders are shaking out their wet camping gear.

A tall man with thinning hair, a goatee and a Gore-Tex jacket approaches us.

Hein Human works for an agricultural organization in the Free State, a province south of Johannesburg.

“I watched a video on YouTube of Simon Roche and didn’t consider it too much. Then, a few months later, YouTube suggested another video from Roche that they thought I would like. I watched that,” he says, “it just clicked for me.”

Later in the morning, Human and the others listen intently to a security briefing by a young security specialist named Ern.

Using a Powerpoint display, he gives a detailed explanation of the Rwandan genocide, in which around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by Hutu gangs in a 100-day orgy of death.

On the top line of his Powerpoint (in Afrikaans): “Our ‘Hutus’ have many more weapons.”
A security specialist named Ern gives a briefing to gathered Suidlanders. - Brent Swails/CNN
White supremacist groups are gaining strength globally. Their members are skewing younger, and by cloaking their racism in victimhood, their racism is becoming more broadly palatable -- on the ground and on the internet.

In South Africa, their ideas are being magnified by the more mainstream activists of AfriForum and given more oxygen by radicals like Julius Malema.

It is a dangerous mix.

“With people focusing on race, we are not able to focus on the real problems, which are really to do with the economy, with poverty, and with unemployment and inequality. That is why this is so damaging. It makes it more difficult for our country to solve our problems,” says Gareth Newham of the ISS.

“Right-wingers in the US are saying ‘All we want is what our grandfathers had.’ That mantra was repeated time and time again in the US,” says Simon Roche.

I am standing with him at a Suidlanders bonfire in the center of the ring of trees.

I ask him if he thinks that their ideas are driven by racism.

“I don’t think it is racism. I don’t get up in the morning hating black people and I think the majority of Suidlanders are like that,” says Roche.
Simon Roche recaps his trip to the United States to his fellow Suidlanders. - Brent Swails/CNN
“There is a certain sense amongst certain sectors of historical white societies, that those societies are being diluted. That those societies are being diluted on other people’s terms,” he says.

“When you use terms like ‘diluted’ I think Nazism,” I interject.

“I think eugenics. I think of all these horrible things from the past. Why is being ‘diluted’ a problem?” I ask.

“No, David, that’s neurotic. The societies are, in demographic terms, being diluted.”

In 1997, South Africa’s first democratic government published a White Paper on land reform, setting out a radical vision for how to address racial inequality in land ownership, and the stark disparities between men and women’s access to land. 

The South African Constitution sought to turn this ideal into a reality, with section 25(5) placing an obligation on the state to “take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis.” 

In November 2017, the then-department of rural development and land reform published a land audit showing how little progress has been made in realising this vision. Seventy-two percent of farm and agricultural land is still held by white people, and only 4% is held by black people. The audit also revealed that women only own 18% of private land, dropping to 13% for farm and agricultural holdings. The results of the audit confirmed that the state’s current approach to land redistribution is failing. 

This failure is particularly harmful for women. The right to use and control land is central to the lives of rural women in South Africa who depend on the land to feed themselves and their families and to derive an income. Access to land creates generational wealth, food security and is a source of self-determination that contributes to women’s social and economic empowerment. The failure to change the gendered patterns of land ownership is a failure to realise women’s right to equality and human dignity.

Given the clear constitutional and political mandate for change, why has land redistribution failed to become a reality for South African women? One of the difficulties in answering this question is the lack of transparency surrounding the state’s redistribution programme – the policies governing the allocation of land are opaque and the data on land reform beneficiaries is rarely published. 

 
A rare exception to this secrecy was a report published by the then-land reform department in 2018, providing data on the outcomes of land redistribution. The report revealed that the number of women beneficiaries under the redistribution programme had been rapidly decreasing. Between 2009 and 2018 there were 8 763 women beneficiaries of land redistribution, making up 41% of the total beneficiaries over this period. However, this was mostly due to the high number of women beneficiaries between 2009 and 2011. The absolute number of women beneficiaries plummeted from 5 795 in 2009-10 to 334 in 2017-18. 

As well as falling in absolute terms, women beneficiaries also made up an increasingly small percentage of the total: in 2009-10 women beneficiaries made up 51% of beneficiaries, but by 2017-18 this had fallen to 25%. In 2013, only 1% of the total beneficiaries for the year were women. 

This disparity is also evident when evaluating individual redistribution programmes. In December 2020, in a presentation to the parliamentary committee on agriculture, land reform and rural development, the government provided information on the number of beneficiaries that had benefited from the state land lease and disposal policy (SLLDP) between February and December 2020. 

The SLLDP is the government’s most recent land redistribution policy adopted in 2013. It only provides beneficiaries with leases for redistributed land, rather than full ownership rights. It nominally gives priority to women, but with the caveat that they demonstrate basic farming skills or a willingness to acquire such skills before being considered. 

Out of the 544 people who benefited from the programme in 2020, only 116 (30.5%) were women. This distribution is even more unequal when the data is broken down into hectare allocation. Male beneficiaries received 82% of the allocated land, while women only received 17.2% of the total hectares allocated. 

    No Expropriation without Compensation in South-Africa’s Constitution – for the Time Being

 
To fully understand the inequality, it is important to understand what rights women acquired over the land. This is because access to land is not enough to transform the gender inequalities in land holding, but it is also important that the rights women acquire in the process enable them to use the land to empower themselves and their families. When considering the type of rights that were awarded under the SLLDP, further barriers to women’s access to land are revealed. 

In 2020, 83% of the women beneficiaries of the lease and disposal policy formed part of a collective, which means that they did not hold individual leases for the land but were instead part of collectives that included men among its membership. In comparison, 50% of the male beneficiaries were awarded the land as individuals. This means that in most cases, women only benefited from land redistribution under the policy if men also benefited. 

It also means that women cannot use the land without consultation and collaboration with men. This leaves them less empowered and at risk of patriarchal constructs of land ownership that subjects women to being perpetual minors who cannot own land in their own name. 

This disparity is partly explained by the way in which the policy was implemented in 2020. Instead of redistributing newly purchased land, the department redistributed 700 000 hectares of farmland it already owned by primarily providing leases to people already occupying the land. This is not real redistribution – rather, it entrenches existing patterns of land holding. 

The current approach to redistribution also reproduces inequality due to its emphasis on demonstrated skills and experience in agriculture. The SLLDP and other national policies target women who either have basic farming skills or demonstrate a willingness to acquire such skills. It is not clear how skills and experience are evaluated when deciding who will receive land. Women in rural areas are the backbone of subsistence farming, but despite these skills, women are unlikely to own the land on which they farm and are less likely to have any formal farming qualification. The existing patterns of land ownership also mean that women are less likely to have farmed commercially or able to demonstrate that they have the skills and experience to run a commercial farm.

 
This policy approach is reflective of a shift towards a strong emphasis on commercial farming. Since 2009, more land has been allocated to fewer beneficiaries. This is largely due to the need to keep land intact for commercial farming operations. Women will not benefit from this approach. The shift has instead made redistribution vulnerable to corruption and collusion between department officials and wealthy and/or politically connected elites who have been the favoured beneficiaries.

There are a number of reforms that would improve the redistribution programme’s ability to address gender inequality in land ownership. First, the state must analyse the need for land in South Africa through a gender equity lens. Too little has been done to identify the wants and needs of women in relation to land and evidence that can be used to inform the design and implementation of land redistribution policies, is limited. This results in an approach that sets redistribution targets that do not consider the specific needs of women. 

Second, policies that are aimed at creating equity in land redistribution must be correctly implemented. What is clear is that even where targets for gender equality are set in policies, they are not met. Women benefit less from these programmes than men, despite being identified as a target group. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there is a need for the legislature to enact legislation that will frame the redistribution programme in South Africa and prioritise women. The current situation is largely due to a lack of a guiding legislative framework as envisioned in section 25(5) of the Constitution. New legislation must create cohesion in the redistribution process, align policy programmes and provide guidelines on how women may be prioritised considering the often-hidden inequalities in the current policy framework. It must compel the development of an agreed set of gender indicators as well as a framework that defines how data on gender equality in redistribution programmes is collected, analysed and presented. This will create more transparency and accountability in land redistribution. 

We cannot redress South Africa’s deepening economic injustices without comprehensive legislative changes that enable women to gain access to land on a substantively equal basis with men. 

The debate about the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation is about much more than the method of land reform.

As South Africa's passionate debate over land redistribution grows, one city outside Johannesburg is preparing what the mayor calls a "test case" for the nation — the seizure of hundreds of acres of land from private owners, without paying for it, to build low-cost housing.

Digesting this deeply sobering analysis by agricultural economist, Dr Lawrence McCrystal, one cannot help but conclude that land redistribution and restitution by whatever means is nothing more than a populist political tool to consolidate and hold onto power, regardless of the consequences.

The attempt last year to amend Section 25 of the Constitution represented a grave threat to whatever chances for future prosperity South Africa had.

In targeting for the first time a provision in the Bill of Rights, it set a terrible precedent by threatening constitutional protection. Some of its proponents even claimed that the Constitution in its current form would not prevent the ultimate policy goal, Expropriation without Compensation.

That the measure failed to pass deserves to be viewed with relief. But as we at the Institute of Race Relations have warned in the intervening period, this was at best a respite.

A Land Court Bill, currently before Parliament, seeks to place land (and land expropriation) matters into a specially created court. The Bill itself is intended to ‘promote land reform as a means of redressing the results of past discrimination and facilitate land justice.’  Its proposed design raises a very real danger of proceedings being loaded in favour of particular outcomes. For example, two lay assessors may be appointed to sit alongside a judge, and may overrule the latter on matters of fact. The Bill is silent on how the assessors will be appointed, and it is far from impossible that  activists hostile to land ownership would be in a position to preside over cases. On certain issues, such as whether ‘nil’ compensation should be awarded, or whether a given property has been abandoned, it is likely that the views of these assessors could be decisive.

   How to counter the Expropriation and Land Court Bills

In addition, there is the Expropriation Bill. President Ramaphosa has declared the government’s intention to pass the Bill into law this year. Dating back in its current iteration to 2019 (but with a policy lineage that extends back over more than a decade), it would establish a new regime for expropriation of property. Among other things, it defines expropriation – and so too, any entitlement to compensation – so as to require the state to take ownership of expropriated property.

This suggests that merely depriving an owner of something – without the state’s acquiring ownership in turn, as was the case with South Africa’s mineral resources under the custodianship provision of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act of 2002 – would not qualify as expropriation. This in turn would make a mass ‘custodial’ taking of a particular asset achievable without any requirement for compensation.

Move on property rights

Simply put, despite the Constitution holding for the moment, the mechanisms for proceeding with a move on property rights are being put in place.

At the same time, there has been a chorus of voices expressing harsh criticisms of the constitutional order, in part or as a whole. These voices include tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu, KwaZulu-Natal premier Sihle Zikalala, former cabinet minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi as well as academics Professors Sipho Seepe and Eddy Maloka.

The basic assertion is that the malaise confronting South Africa arises from a lack of radicalism, this having been constrained by a timid compromise in the 1990s and the Constitution that embodied it.

Thus, Prof Maloka says that: ‘Our approach should not be piecemeal – about land, the judiciary, or this and that. Instead, we should be bold and decisive and overhaul the entire dispensation to align it with our times.’

Prof Seepe was more direct, attacking both the ANC and the state, claiming that ‘the post-1994 dispensation legitimised ill-gotten economic gains under apartheid.’ The ANC had been infiltrated, he went on to write, to the extent that it is ‘now embraced by even the most racist among our citizens’ (does this mean that the ANC is attracting large numbers of bigoted white voters..?), and ‘a state without any revolutionary content is a threat to our hard earned democratic dispensation.’

Sisulu denounced the judiciary as ‘mentally colonised’, while Zikalala proposed replacing the supremacy of the Constitution (and the law) with Parliamentary democracy. ‘We want to issue the call for us to debate whether it is not time to move away from absolute rule by the Constitutional Court to a situation where we have a parliamentary democracy in which the voice of the people who elected is supreme to all other voices,’ Zikalala declared.

Counterproductive

In a very real sense, this is an extension of the attempt to alter Section 25. It sees the constitutional order as the problem, not the counterproductive nature or impracticability of policy or its inept implementation. This is part populism, but arguably more fundamentally ideological.

Unsurprisingly, in all of this, land is a central motif. Thus, Minister Sisulu opines: ‘The land is where it all begins. And the law of the land makes or breaks.’ Prof Seepe asserts that land is fundamental to the true revolutionary posture whose absence he bemoans: ‘Land is at the core of any anticolonial struggle. Reclaiming the land would have been the first order of business. With the loss of the ideological narrative, Africans have no control of the future.’

In a similar vein, for Mr Ramathlodi, the Constitution is the culprit: ‘The essence of the 1913 Land Act retained under the New Constitution in section 25 must be reconsidered.’ 

Contained within all of this is the notion that with a more aggressive and assertive form of political mobilisation, with the removal on the limits on the state’s powers, veritable economic miracles are possible. (In 2018, President Ramaphosa claimed that EWC would turn the country into a Garden of Eden – an attempt at allegory that fell flat.) To quote Mr Ramathlodi: ‘In this regard, the developmental state must be activist and take out scissors to perform the necessary caesarean birth.’

Lyrical though that last comment is, it is also delusional. A good part of the reason for the disappointing outcomes of land reform – and support of small business, policing, education and so on – is precisely that the state is not up to the task. South Africa’s state is not developmental, although it certainly tries to be activist. The result, in practical terms, is a mixture of some dire laissez-faire neglect in some areas, and the constraints of an intrusive and often extortionate government apparatus in others.

Actually, in this respect Prof Seepe is partially correct when he says of the ANC that ‘instead of using the state as an instrument at the service of the poor, it does the opposite.’ But he fails to note that much of the blame for this can be placed squarely at the door of the ANC’s conscious decision to politicise the state administration in the 1990s, thereby preventing a meritocratic, professionalised civil service from emerging. In so doing, it destroyed the prospect of a developmental state.

Broad ideological thrust

Such actions were, however, in keeping with the broad ideological thrust of the ANC and with its National Democratic Revolution. One might describe them as the natural outgrowth of the revolutionary impulse.

South Africa’s future needs a good deal less ideology, and a good deal more pragmatism. This is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look, but is unfortunately not entirely clear to our political and intellectual elites.

The disparaging of the constitutional order is intrinsically a threat to property rights, and to land ownership, both on the part of those who own and those who aspire to do so. Indeed, a successful land reform programme holds value for all of us – but it will not be delivered by the ideologues and venal individuals who are using it to frame their arguments.  

The EWC agenda, and all that surrounds it, remains very much in place, and the present is no time for complacency.

There is a broad consensus that agricultural development is key to unlocking the economic possibilities of the communal areas in South Africa. The National Development Plan confirms as much.

The government is open to negotiating with farm owners to find viable solutions to  land expropriation without compensation, says rural development & land reform minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane. 

South Africa would experience an “imminent socio-economic disaster” if expropriation without compensation (EWC) was pursued, with the anticipated decline in gross domestic product (GDP) possibly leading to a loss of more than 2.28 million jobs, according to an independent economic impact assessment of the proposed policy.

Agri SA confirms its position that expropriation without compensation (EWC) will have dire socio-economic impacts. The danger of EWC is especially pertinent as the constitutional review committee (CRC) is expected to finalise their recommendation on the amendment of section 25 of the Constitution this week.

What is the most important ingredient of economic success? You can make an argument that it is the rate of technological progress.

A key land reform lesson South Africa can take from Zimbabwe is that the country experienced record-low investment in agriculture due to land rights issues. 

“The consequences of so many people going to bed without a proper meal are manifold”, said TAU SA General Manager Bennie van Zyl, keynote speaker at a recent international conference on agriculture in Cape Town sponsored by Agri-Food-Aqua of London, England.

The South African Government has tabled the types of property it will be targeting for land expropriation without compensation, following reports of a leaked document at the start of December.

Guests at the Tugela Private Game Reserve once rambled through the bush in open-air four-wheel-drives in search of leopards, elephants and other wildlife that roamed the 17,000-acre property.

The draft Expropriation Bill gazetted by public works minister Thulas Nxesi last week for public comment was a disappointment and would not accelerate land reform, the Land Access Movement of SA (Lamosa) said.

The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa is attempting to give white-owned land back to its Black indigenous population, after a legacy of colonization resulted in this theft, thus denying Black South Africans of many economic opportunities.