GIVEN the slow pace of land reform in South Africa, a certain degree of mania, if not outright hysteria was to be expected from the usual suspects with regard to the centenary on Wednesday of the Natives' Land Act. 

However, here at the Mahogany Ridge even the most cynical of the regulars were taken aback at the attempts to link the auction earlier this month of Julius Malema's cabbage patch in Limpopo to the legacy of the legislation that went on to become a cornerstone of apartheid. What really should have been an occasion rich in irony was apparently now sadly symbolic of a far larger malaise.

The farm sale, for example, had plunged Malaika wa Azania - a self-described "non-partisan pan-Africanist socialist activist" with a silly name - into an "absolute rage". Thus unhinged she'd bashed away at her Mail&Guardian Thought Leader blog: "It signals a tragic legitimisation of a historical injustice against black people; an injustice that continues to devour the little bit of dignity that we have left in the face of the onslaught of white monopoly capital."

Wa Azania's problem, of course, was that some boere had bought the farm - and at a bargain price to boot. "So," she fumed, "not only have white people stolen land from us: they can now even buy it for half what it is worth at auctions after it has been taken from black people."

Xolela Mangcu, author of Biko: A Biography, argued much the same thing, albeit in a more considered fashion, in The Sowetan. The sale, he wrote, "restored to [the purchasers] a puniest bit [of land] that has been put in black hands since 1994". 

There is something perhaps dishonest about this assertion. It suggests that Malema came to be a gentleman farmer through the land restitution process. This was not the case, and Mangcu is well aware the farm was bought on an open market. 

But he's on firmer ground elsewhere. "The buying back of Malema's farm," he claimed, "is a metaphor for strategic leadership by those who spend their time thinking about the things that really matter, while the politicians spend their time entertaining the people with slogans and telling them fictional tales about the revolution."

With next year's elections, the coming months will see the slogans and romanticism about the revolution will increase in pitch as the demands for expropriation without compensation grow more shrill. Sadly, the clamour will all but drown out any discussion on the true legacy of the 1913 Land Act - and that is the manner in which unelected, traditional leaders can impose their power and control over all the land and the 16 million people in the former Bantustans. 

Aninka Claassens, the lawyer who heads up the Rural Women's Action Research Project, points to a "package" of legislation introduced by the ruling party - such as the contested Traditional Courts Bill, 2003's Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act, 2004's Communal Land Rights Act, a number of provincial laws and the National Traditional Affairs Bill - aimed at entrenching far-reaching, unilateral power with the chiefs.

In effect, Claassens argued in the Mail&Guardian, the bantustans remain. "Now, as in the past, a ruling elite has reached for the law to bolster its contested authority and monopolise land and other resources at the expense of the poorest," she said.

But on to lighter matters. SA Communist Party general secretary Blade Nzimande has suggested, in his weekly letter to the party's online newsletter, that capitalism - ho-hum - has had its dastardly way with the country's youth for long enough and it's time we all said, okay, we'll have no more of that, thank you very much.

Actually, he didn't say that. Instead, he said, "Youth has been casualised, retrenched, labour-brokered and thrown into the highest levels of youth unemployment since the Great Depression of the early 1930s. However, the sheer scale and intensity of youth unemployment, inactivity and under-employment globally is at a scale not seen since the industrial revolution."

At which point (the second paragraph) I had to stop reading this man's bilge. I am no longer a young man. Time is precious. I have things to do, a life to get on with. And I suspect the youth feel the same way about his tedious ramblings. Hell, I bet even Nzimande agrees with me that he is the dullard's dullard, and unless he does something spectacular rather quickly, like resign as minister of higher education, history will not be all that kind with this botherer.

As for the youth, well, it is only politicians who cause them harm. It's been that way from the get-go. Ask any youngster. They know everything anyway.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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