South Africa's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party leader Julius Malema in Parliament, Cape Town, on February 13, 2020.
Just over 110 years ago, ‘black’ South Africans who had already endured over 200 years of oppressive colonial rule were formally deprived of almost all their land.
Now an election due in May could revisit that grievance, which remains unresolved years later after the dawn of democracy.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party – in power since apartheid’s demise in 1994 – is facing challengers who have put land issues at the top of their election campaign agendas.
One such entity is Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Various polls have shown it capable of drawing between 13 and 19 per cent, on current assessments, in the May 29 national and provincial elections.
For the EFF, land and its ownership or control, are core aspects of the party’s policies, to be implemented on assumption of power.
The EFF says it will return “all the land to the indigenous inhabitants of South Africa” – but only through state ownership.
Malema told the Nation that if his party came to power, it would “return the land to its owners.”
Several other political organisations are contesting, or wishing to contest, the forthcoming elections and for whom land is also a key issue. But the EFF is by far the most powerful and established of these entities.
What those wishing to undo the legacy of colonialism and apartheid are primarily focused on is the complete reversal of the notorious 1913 Natives Land Act.
That law passed in the newly-created ‘Union of South Africa’ – then a British colony – provided the legislative means to complete the land dispossessions that had been underway since early colonial times.
This tool of dispossession, which preceded apartheid by 35 years, laid the foundations for the spatial and land dispossession of the great majority of citizens (over 80 per cent) not of colonial descent, as experienced under the apartheid system that separated by race all aspects of life in South Africa.
That law was rescinded, along with many other race-based laws, after the ANC came to power in 1994, but its iniquitous legacy largely remains.
Several initiatives have taken place since 1994 to reverse the land dispossession of the previous 350 years, plus the promotion of ‘black’ land ownership – but there has been no ‘mass return of land to the dispossessed’.
A major effort by the ANC, initiated under former president Jacob Zuma and carried forward under current President Cyril Ramaphosa, which envisaged land redistribution to the historically dispossessed through various means including expropriation without compensation, failed due to embedded protections for land owners in 1996 Constitution.
The ANC drove this proposed change but it was the EFF which played the lead role, repeatedly tabling expropriation without compensation legislation in Parliament, its last failed effort taking place in 2018.
The ANC, EFF and others wishing to see enforced land restitution could not obtain the requisite three-quarters majority in Parliament needed to amend the Constitution to allow a mass land redistribution law, without compensation.
Operating on the agreed ‘willing buyer-willing seller’ arrangement negotiated as part of the end of apartheid, the ANC had managed to transfer only relatively small parcels of land to ‘black’ ownership after more than 20 years in power.
The result has been a growing demand for land, both rural, with many people living on less than ideal or marginal agricultural land, and urban, where millions are living in informal shack settlements without any land rights.
In 2017 a land ownership survey by the government revealed that 72 percent of the land privately owned still resided in ‘white’ hands (almost 26.7 million ha), with mixed-race citizens owning 15 percent, those of Indian extraction owning five percent and ‘black’ or ‘indigenous’ South Africans owning just four percent, or 1.3 m ha.
That assessment included both urban and rural land, skewing the severe land hunger experienced by urban dwellers, an ever-growing segment of the population.
In 2022, Statista, an independent statistical analysis entity, said that 68.34 percent of South Africa's total population was urbanised.
A large proportion of these people live in informal shantytown settlements, located on private, municipal, or state land.
A result of the persisting inequities and growing demand, especially in the urban context, has been increasing political pressure to resolve the problem.
Those determined to undo the inequities of the colonial and apartheid past, especially the EFF, say that steps towards black land empowerment and restitution have self-evidently been minimal and marginal.
If elected, the EFF says it would simply “take the land away from those who stole it”, with the state holding all land rights and allowing those who farm commercially to do so under long lease, or to be allocated communally-held property for use of rural (‘black’) communities.
But that is almost the same route taken, in effect, by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s when his post-independence regime was under pressure to provide for former veterans of the liberation war, and others unable to find employment.
The Zimbabwean ‘land grabs’ which the Mugabe regime allowed, with some brutal violence against ‘white’ farmers and their families involved, caused a flight of capital from that country.
Sanctions were also imposed by Western countries, the resulting fiscal turbulence contributing greatly to the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, a travail that continues to cause daily suffering for Zimbabweans, many forced to flee to South Africa just to eat.
While in the ANC, Malema and other militants insisted that the land issue was primary, and that what the ANC had done, since apartheid’s fall, was grossly inadequate relative to the growing demand for land and land rights.
The problem for the EFF and others determined to “seize back stolen land” is that not all land in ‘white’ hands was in fact dispossessed – and a significant portion is already in ‘black’ hands, albeit collectively held.
There were agreements with indigenous communities during the colonial period for large tracts of land to be owned or farmed by white settlers, then mostly Afrikaners fleeing oppressive British colonial rule in the Cape and Natal colonies.
Also, some of the best agricultural land in Africa are under collective communal control, the most notable being the Zulus’ Ingonyama Trust, which holds some 2.8 million ha (about 7.6 percent).
Formed on the eve of the first democratic elections in 1994, this Trust was part of the settlement which avoided a race and ethnic war, providing traditionalist Zulus with an irreversible communal land allocation in their home province of KwaZulu-Natal.
There are also some lesser communal land holdings which, together with the Ingonyama Trust, represent a dead end for those like the EFF.
The Zulu traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party, and even some loyalists of former president Jacob Zuma, say that any attempt to reverse Zulu land rights would be met “with force.”
In the cities where state housing has been provided to the poor, land rights have been granted to most state-built home owners.
Six ANC-led administrations have settled 80,664 land claims for some 2.1 million beneficiaries at the cost of US$2 billion – falling far short of the demands being made for land equity.
ANC administration has also engaged in agricultural development programmes to help those who have received land settlements to become economically viable, with some successes but also significant failures.
The result is that despite its pre-1994 promises, the ANC in 30 years has not “returned the land to the masses” in any large measure.
The land hunger issue, therefore, has grown, without an obvious end in sight beyond the extremist measures espoused by the EFF and others demanding “land for all”, by any means.
