Ndiyabulisa kuwe Mbhexeshi oyiNtloko, nakuwe Sihlalo ohloniphekileyo nakuMalungu ePalamente, kwiindwendwe zonke zoMphathiswa ezize kukhunga lo msebenzi nani malungu abekekileyo ndiyanibhotisa. [I greet the Chief Whip, the hon Chairperson and the Members of Parliament, and all the visitors of the Minister who came to honour this event and also the hon members, I greet you all.]
Chairperson, in order to promote social reconstruction, transitional states often must deal with past injustices. The difficult issue frequently facing these states is what to do when former regimes have unjustly confiscated property from one group and given it to another.
Professor Bernadette Atuahene, in her research report of 2010, states that:
The most common response is to do nothing, but South Africa, Kosovo, Romania, the Baltic Republic, El Salvador, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are among the few nations that have compensated their citizens for property violations that occurred under prior regimes. South Africa, however, stands head and shoulders above other nations because her citizens have a unique constitutional right to restitution for the past property violations.
Professor Atuahene does not only present research findings to satisfy her academic curiosity but expresses the world reality of why there is unemployment, poverty and inequality in the listed countries. She is not only explaining this phenomenon of underdevelopment across the globe, but also gives reasons why we have to deal with the South African past imbalances and why we are lagging behind in economic development and in other fields of life.
She states that:
Wealth is an intergenerational phenomenon: it is accumulated during a person's lifetime and then passed along to kin. Likewise, disadvantage is also accumulated over generations such that the devastating tremors from the initial theft of assets - like the theft of Mrs Green's house - reverberate through time.
Since 1652, successive colonial powers systematically dispossessed thousands of South Africa's original citizens through the barrel of a gun, until 1910, when they created a union of the four republics they founded through the land dispossession. In 1913, they promulgated the Natives Land Act to formalise what they thought was the permanent removal of the natives from their soil.
Not only did they forbid Africans from owning land in the union, but they also forbade even rental of land outside the designated reserves which constituted approximately 7,13% of South Africa's total land area. Since then, they began to consolidate their stronghold over land by removing black people from their own land. For example, over 3,5 million people were removed from what they termed "black spots" into Bantustans between 1950 and 1986 alone.
They not only dumped them in the former Bantustans, they also dumped them in what they called townships because they regarded them as temporary sojourners in their republic of South Africa, when they only have energy to provide service to the colonisers. They removed black people from Marabastad. They removed them from Pretoria and dumped them in Laudium. They removed the people from Amstelhof to Mbekweni. They removed them from District Six to the Cape Flats, far from the places where work is found, and many more were removed after that.
The ANC believes the land question is a national phenomenon and not a local problem. The ANC believes that "land is a fundamental feature of ownership and control". Over 350 years, generations of colonial and apartheid beneficiaries have acquired racial, gender and class concentration of property from the initial primitive accumulation through the barrel of a gun. I am emphasising here the barrel of a gun! [Applause.] The reason being that Tata Mandela had warned us, all generations to come, that this country must never respect, or even learn, the practices of the past, and therefore nobody will lose his property through the barrel of a gun ever again. [Applause.]
Thanks to the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, South Africans who knew the value of successful coexistence decided that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, both black and white.
However, that was not an unconditional statement, as they believed that revenge and reparations cannot develop South Africa into the land of their dreams. They wanted "the land to be shared among those who work it". They envisaged a South Africa that was at peace with itself, with its neighbours and the world. They knew, even at that time, that progress and development can only be achieved through working together.
In Polokwane, and more recently in Mangaung, the ANC decided that the restitution of lost land rights and land tenure was more urgent as millions of the rural population continue to live in poverty and unemployment. The key to this point is the fact that land redistribution in South Africa is neither driven by reparations of the Khulumani style, nor is it pursuant of the Arch's wealth tax, but by a reconciliatory approach to nation building and social cohesion.
In many cases, absentee land barons do not care for these, but money. They speculate in many cases for high prices on land. They drag out negotiations for a long time when we want to buy their land. They are mostly willing to sell marginal land and abuse our justice system by clinging to large chunks of land which could radically reduce unemployment, poverty and ultimately alter the relations and agrarian structure of our society.
It is precisely why pressure is put on the ANC by many stakeholders who met during the land summit in 2005 in Johannesburg to levy taxes on unused land speculators. Foreigners who buy land in sensitive areas of our country, along the coast - sometimes alongside poverty-stricken villagers - use it for leisure and not to contribute to food security for our country. [Applause.] There are large corporations that hold large tracts of land. Many landless citizens go to bed without food even though these people own land. In this regard, caps or ceilings for land-holdings are called for. In order to intervene in the land markets, it is necessary, Minister, for the state to move faster in establishing the office of the Valuer-General to regulate land prices and valuations and, by extension, land possession in order to redistribute the land.
Better still, it is also necessary for the ANC to identify and acquire more strategically located agricultural land in order to deracialise ownership of land throughout South Africa. When all is said and done, it is vitally important that we move with the necessary speed to reopen the lodgement of land claims to accommodate many people who could not lodge land claims within the cut-off date of 31 December 1998. [Applause.]
We have to do this also to accommodate the descendants of the Khoi and the San who predominantly lost their land prior to 1913. [Applause.] An amendment to the Restitution of Land Rights Act, Act 22 of 1994, is necessary to facilitate the protection of families. Comrade Minister, we in the portfolio committee are still haunted by the case in which three siblings took one another to court because one sibling claimed a collective piece of land for himself and left the other siblings out. The court ruled in favour of the one who lodged the claim and as for those who did not claim, the court ruled against them; they lost their right because they did not exercise it.
In our committee we believe that a right, especially given to you by the Constitution, should not be removed because of feeling or a lack of feeling, which is a mere administrative action. A right is a right, and it must be protected. [Applause.] We have a number of cases in North West where a chief who was young - his uncle took over as regent - lost a claim on behalf of the tribe. When the son came of age and claimed his throne the chief refused, claiming that it was given to him because the grown-up nephew did not claim the land.
We also want the presettlement support of these claimants to be produced during the claiming process so that we prevent disputes and settle them even before they start. When the land is handed over to them, they must hit the land running to produce food and secure food security for their children.
The National Development Plan 2030, NDP, realised that most land transactions thus far yielded little food security and revival of the rural economy. The ANC conference in Mangaung decided to scale up the tempo of land redistribution so that it focuses beyond the 23 poorest municipal districts of the country and impacts on larger areas; and not just through projects, but programmes.
Within the New Growth Path, NGP, the beneficiation of agricultural produce and modernisation of farming methods by skilling and equipping the youth while supporting smallholding farmers is necessary. This will be combined with efforts to farm large tracts of land in various areas in the rural areas.
Given the fact that I am left with one and a half minutes, Minister, I want to deal with the evidence. The Minister has been involved in many activities across the country regarding rural development, but I want to show this document, for the benefit of those who came here and for the members of this House. Here is the body of evidence of the work that this department has been doing since 2009 in the rural areas.
You can see that this is a thick document, listing all the activities of this department in the rural areas. I will leave it here for people to have a look at. It is evidence. You can go and have a look yourselves. They say seeing is believing, and the Bible says in John 3:11: "Sithetha esikwaziyo singqine esikubonileyo." [Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen.] [Applause.]
One of the most important pieces of evidence that I want to share with all of you today is the Uthungulu Project in KwaZulu-Natal. Many people are angry when they want their land. Guess what this department has done? It has invited the previous beneficiary of the apartheid land reform by saying, come and work with the new beneficiaries who are going to inherit the land, so that when they come onto this land they have people who say this is what we have been doing to produce food. You must then just do the work and produce food for yourself and not for the master. It is working! Go to Uthungulu in KwaZulu-Natal and see for yourself. [Applause.]
When we looked at this as a committee, and compared it to iLembe, where the people just took the land and it is not being utilised ...