New land reform laws for RSA

SOUTH Africa will introduce new legislation to hasten reforms which have left the bulk of land still in white minority hands.

Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti said current legislation was ‘admirable’ but had failed to unlock an apartheid-era divide that saw whitesowning 87 per cent the nation’s farmland.’Sadly, it is too fragmented to effectively address the centuries-old land question in South Africa’, Nkwinti told Parliament in Cape Town. Draft legislation will soon be served to parliament. ‘We are opening a debate and a discussion on the need to review the current land tenure system as a whole,’ he said. Land reform is a priority for the government of President Jacob Zuma, who pledged in his state of the nation address to upgrade poor black shanty towns and to hand land to at least 500 000 households by 2014.The issue has become increasingly contentious in southern Africa afterZimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s land reforms saw some 4 000 white farmers lose their land in an often violent campaign.Unlike neighbouring Zimbabwe, South Africa has focused on a willing buyer,willing seller programme and the restitution of land taken from blacks.A controversial bill on land expropriation was shelved last year. Nkwinti warned in October last year that the free-market approach was not cast in stone, saying the Pretoria government could not continue to afford high land prices.’We cannot continue to slavishly rely on the principle of willing-buyer willing-seller,’ he said then. – AFP

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