ANC government has only achieved 9% of its land reform targets

19 April 2018

The Auditor-General (AG) and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform have revealed in Parliament that the Department has only achieved a dismal 9% of its land reform targets in the third quarter of financial year 2017/18.

Overall the Department only achieved 36%, with Rural Development programme only achieving 43% and Restitution programme at 50% of targets met.

The Department is mandated to purchase and earmark land as well as to identify beneficiaries through the Agriculture Land Holding Account. However, this process has been hamstrung by the ANC due to their lack of political will and rampant corruption. Emerging Black farmers have been left to fend for themselves as a result of the ANC’s failure to provide continuous training so that they can become enterprising farmers.

This yet again confirms what was pointed out in the High Level Panel report that the constraints to land reform is not compensation of land but rather “increasing evidence of corruption by officials, the diversion of the land reform budget to elites, lack of political will, and lack of training and capacity have proved more serious stumbling blocks to land reform”.

According to an extensive land reform audit conducted in March 2014 by the Western Cape Government, a total of 62% of Land Reform projects driven by the DA government have been successful. This is in stark contrast to the ANC’s failure rate of 90% for land reform projects managed by the ruling party.

The DA is of the view that the ANC’s land reform programme of state custodianship is doomed to fail as it doesn’t ensure that Black people have permanent ownership of the land.

In truth, the ANC’s expropriation without compensation is merely to hide decades of mismanagement of land reform in South Africa.

The DA will continue to fight to ensure that the land reform process benefits Black South Africans and we will not buckle to any political pressure by the ANC and the EFF whose sole aim is to make our people permanent tenants on the land.

Issued by Thandeka Mbabama, DA Shadow Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, 19 April 2018