Research and Policy Brief: Land ownership and land reform in South Africa - 27th February 2012
Dr Pieter Mulder has courted great controversy with comments that black South Africans have no historical claim to land in the Northern and Western Cape and also that blacks own a greater share of the country's land than the government admits. His comments come against claims that whites owned 87% of South Africa's land and that little progress has been made in changing this picture. However some basic arithmetic reveals that a far greater share of the country is in black hands than is often acknowledged. It is also apparent that ensuring the productivity of the portion remaining in white hands is increasingly important to the Government in maintaining political stability in urban areas. This has implications for the manner in which future land policy is implemented.
Any discussion on land ownership in South Africa risks generating more heat than light. Part of the reason for this is that few people who enter the discussion bother to do any research into current land ownership patterns. Very few of Dr Mulder's critics chose to challenge him on points of fact but resorted to all manner of racial taunts and insults. Let us take another approach and do the arithmetic to see who actually owns how much of South Africa's land.
South Africa has a total surface area of 122 million hectares. As of March 2011 31 million hectares or 25% of that surface area was in the hands of the State. The remaining 91 million hectares or 75% of the surface area was privately owned. The balance of State and privately owned land varied greatly between provinces. For example in the great expanses of the Free State and the Northern Cape private owners held 89% and 91% of the surface area respectively. In both the Western Cape and Gauteng 55% was held by the State.
State owned land would previously have been regarded as part of the white owned 87%. It follows then that it should now be regarded as black owned, which means that at least a quarter of the country's surface area is in black hands. There is nothing preventing the State from handing title to much of that land to black people.
Since 1995 2.6 million hectares or the equivalent 2.1% of all land has been handed to blacks via land restitution programmes. This figure pushes the amount of land in black hands to at least 27.1%. In addition more than R5 billion was paid out to restitution claimants who accepted cash payments instead of having land returned to them. That R5 billion was sufficient to purchase an additional 2.6 million hectares which would have pushed the amount of land in black hands to just on 30%.