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Land Reform: A Call to Action for the National Dialogue
A citizen gestures as she makes submissions before a land expropriation hearing in Cape Town, on August 4, 2018. Teams from Parliament's Joint Constitutional Review Committee held hearings throughout South Africa to hear views on the amendment of Section 25 of the Constitution, which would allow the government to expropriate land without compensation.
Image: AFP
Zamikhaya Maseti
As we mark the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, the soul of South Africa's struggle document must be returned to centre stage, especially its most uncompromising and emotive clause, "The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It." Born out of the searing injustice of the 1913 Land Act, this clause was not poetic idealism; it was a war cry, a confrontation with a colonial and apartheid order that uprooted, dispossessed, and dismantled the African peasantry and agrarian enterprise.
The 1913 Natives Land Act was the legal scalpel that excised millions of Africans from their ancestral land, amputating them from their economic base and cultural lifeblood. It barred Africans from owning land in over 87% of South Africa and confined them to impoverished reserves, setting in motion a cycle of economic dependency, landlessness, and systemic poverty. This legislative monstrosity didn't merely displace Africans; it decimated the foundations of independent African agriculture, fragmenting black self-sufficiency and creating a vast, disenfranchised class of landless labourers.
The demand for land was, therefore, not an abstract constitutional matter; it was the nerve centre of the liberation struggle. From the days of the ANC's founding in 1912 through to the Defiance Campaign, the armed struggle, and the dawn of democracy in 1994, the land question animated every revolutionary syllable. Yet, three decades after democracy, we are compelled to ask, has this revolutionary demand been met with revolutionary action?
The democratic state attempted a course correction through policy, most notably the 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy, which articulated three pillars: land redistribution, tenure reform, and land restitution. The policy framework acknowledged that land reform was a moral, social, and economic imperative, seeking to reverse apartheid's legacy, reduce rural poverty, and broaden access to land for black South Africans.
There must be an honest and sober appreciation of the effort and intentions embodied in this White Paper. It laid a progressive foundation. However, 28 years into democracy, its delivery has been stunted, bureaucratised, and chronically underfunded. Redistribution has been slow and haphazard. Tenure reform has lacked political teeth. Restitution processes have been mired in delays and legal technicalities. Most damningly, the very beneficiaries of the land reform project have, in large part, been set up to fail.
Out of the 8 million hectares of land transferred to black beneficiaries, only 10% is being optimally used. This statistic is not only shocking, but it is a direct indictment of post-transfer support systems, or lack thereof. Black farmers, many of them first-generation, are starved of working capital, extension services, access to markets, and irrigation infrastructure. They are given land but not the tools to work it, nor the scaffolding to sustain it. In effect, this model has birthed a new underclass of landholders who remain economically marginal and agriculturally voiceless.
This failure is reflected in their marginal contribution to national food security. Black farmers contribute less than 10% to South Africa's agricultural GDP. 85% of agricultural land remains in the hands of white commercial farmers, many of whom are ageing. Yet, it is these farmers, not the supposed 'beneficiaries' of the land reform programme, who feed the nation. This reality was starkly captured by Moeletsi Mbeki, who boldly declared that 'white farmers feed South Africa,' and warned that the current land reform trajectory is unsustainable and economically suicidal. His assessment, though uncomfortable, is factually grounded and brutally honest.
A demonstrator holds a placard reading "yes to land expropriation without compensation" as thousands of workers take part in a national strike called by the South African Federation of Trade Unions SAFTU on April 25, 2018 in Johannesburg.
Image: AFP
The 2017 Land Audit corroborated this truth, despite government promises, by 2013, the state had failed to redistribute even the 13% of agricultural land it had committed to transferring to black hands. This is not just a policy failure, it is a betrayal of the promise encoded in the Freedom Charter and a squandering of the historical responsibility that democracy entrusted to the post-apartheid state.
Worse still, this policy inertia opens up space for distortion. The recent phenomenon of 49 white farmers falsely claiming farm killings, amplified by none other than Elon Musk, reflects how unresolved land reform narratives can be hijacked for global disinformation campaigns. In this context, we must separate fiction from fact. South Africa's land reform has been too lethargic, not too radical.
That is why the upcoming National Dialogue must tear through the platitudes and confront the land question as the unfinished business of our liberation. It must be brutally honest about what kind of land reform South Africa needs in 2025 and beyond. It must wrestle with the diverse and competing demands for land, land for residential purposes in urban and peri-urban areas, land for agricultural production to rebuild the black agrarian class, and land for agri-industrial expansion, to allow black entrepreneurs to enter the high-value food processing and export economy.
If we are to achieve agricultural justice, we must understand that 'those who work the land' are not a rhetorical category. They are aspiring farmers, agricultural engineers, landless labourers, and black youth with no rural inheritance. The system has yet to make room for them. They must be incubated, funded, trained, and connected to markets. South Africa cannot afford to allow 80% of redistributed farms to lie fallow while its people go hungry and its black farmers remain spectators.
The National Dialogue must resist becoming another elite talk shop. It must become a site of truth-telling, accountability, and bold policy rupture. The time has come to turn the war cry of 'The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It' into a national economic strategy, one that liberates land not only as a space, but as a productive force that re-energises food security, rural economies, and black dignity.
Land is not just a historical grievance. It is the foundation of South Africa's future. If the National Dialogue fails to grasp this, then it will not only fail the Freedom Charter, but it will also fail the nation itself.
* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
