For black South Africans, seizure of land is a matter of justice

Antony Sguazzin and Amogelang Mbatha, Bloomberg

published

6:38 AM CST, Saturday, January 26, 2019

While the land grab debate divides South Africa and threatens to scare investors, for many black citizens the problem is not about agriculture, but about justice.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said that his ruling party was considering amending the constitution to allow the seizure of land without compensation, in order to remedy the inequities of the laws imposed by the regime of the white minority, which had already entrusted 87% of southern lands -africaines to whites. The goal is also to give more black citizens the opportunity to earn a living. Yet, with over three-fifths of the country's 57.7 million inhabitants in the cities, many people have no desire to farm.

"The expropriation of land is important because the land was forcibly removed from our ancestors," said Nhlanhla Mahlangu, a 28-year-old unemployed woman living in the slums of Zandspruit, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. stay in the commercial capital. "Some people might prefer money and others, like me, would prefer a lot on which to build their own homes rather than living in cabins."

The ruling African National Congress says that 24 years after the end of apartheid, the time has come to tackle the problem of the land. Critics say the previous reform programs she oversaw had failed and her renewed goal was to try to counter the populist Economic Freedom Fighters ahead of the May election. Many South Africans say more needs to be done to provide adequate housing in rapidly expanding cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town.

"Urban dwellers prefer to keep their lives and livelihoods" in the cities, said 32-year-old Phumla Kunene, who works in the freight sector in the port city of Durban in the south-east of the country. "Some of them do not want to have anything to do with rural areas, so the best option is financial compensation."

While some previous attempts to return the land to the descendants of their original owners included the option of payment instead of land, the ANC did not mention this possibility in his new record.

The EFF, which calls for all lands to be held by the state, has captured the imagination of many young South Africans by demanding that everything from land to banks be nationalized to help accelerate the transfer of wealth to the majority. black.

Rapper Cassper Nyovest had a hit last year with Ksazobalit, a song about black citizens recovering land seized by white colonialists. The music video ends with a skeptical farmer who speaks Afrikaans dancing and shares a meal with young blacks dressed in fashion.

Simple words such as "we have the land back" are often used on social media to express their approval.

Yet, a study by the South African Race Relations Institute found that only 4 percent of black South Africans surveyed ranked agrarian reform as one of two key issues that the government should address.

"We are a society in the process of urbanization and a society in which opportunities are closely related to skills," said Terence Corrigan, a researcher at the institute. "Most South Africans see their future secured by a job in a city and a good education for their children."

Jobs, drug addiction and crime were the main concerns of the investigation and, for many observers, the ground sale of the ANC poses a threat to the economy. The unemployment rate is almost record: 27%.

"There were certainly historical injustices, but agrarian reform in the agrarian sense is not going to transform the resolution of South Africa's problems," Corrigan said. "You need exceptional expertise, funds and goodwill, I see very little of it, it has very little to do with socio-economic problems and much more with the I-I-I-I-I-I ideology and politics. "

There is still little clarity about what most people would do if they were given land outside the cities.

"We need the land, that's what I know for sure, but we do not know why we need it," said David Makgata, a 24-year-old satellite TV technician living in the suburbs. black of Alexandra. "Even if I have land, what am I going to do with it?"