The report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture was presented to President Ramaphosa on 4 May 2019 and made available to the public in July. Even before this date, two panelists - Dan Kriek (president of AgriSA) and Nick Serfontein (well-known farmer) - decided to hand over a minority report to the President. It was made available to the public after the main report.
What are the key differences between the main report and the minority report? Why did these two respected panelists find it necessary to draft a minority report? The differences can be summarised in three groups: process issues, style and ideological issues and substantive issues.
As for the process of the Advisory Panel, the minority report is rather critical. The various working groups took too long to finalise their reports and therefore, their content could not be timeously and sufficiently commented upon. With a deadline of March 31 to submit a report to the Inter-ministerial Committee, certain working group reports were still outstanding on March 24. The first draft report was sent to panelists only late afternoon on March 29, with a deadline for comment less than 48 hours later.
The first report was clearly a “cut-and-paste” product. Comments by Kriek and Serfontein have not been sufficiently taken into account in the final report - although differences amongst members are mentioned briefly in the main report. The minority report's main objection to the process is that after two colloquiums, the views of external participants “in a way” became part of the report's recommendations, without any attempt to reach consensus among panelists.
If one reads the main report in depth, the rush with which it was drawn up is clear. There are numerous spelling and grammatical errors, and many repetitions. This may indicate that there were different authors for different parts (which is not uncommon with such a report), but it is clear that there was no proper editing done to avoid repetitions, and especially contradictions. The Chairman's foreword, for example, contains other emphases than the main part of the report (such as the case of willing seller-willing buyer).
The argument in the main part of the report contains recommendations here and there, and the recommendations chapter contains a lot of argumentation, often repetitive. The question can therefore rightly be asked: if not written by the authors of the minority report, which of the panelists did the main writing? And why wasn't consensus sought?