Mr Chairman and fellow debaters, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends.

My starting point, as it so often is for speakers on behalf of Cosatu and its allies, is our Freedom Charter, which deals concisely and sharply with our topic tonight, though rather than "Whose land is it?", it seeks to answer the related question - "Whose land should it be?" It says:

• The land shall be shared among those who work it!
• Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger;
• The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers;
• Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land;
• All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose;
• People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished.

In the 1950s the answer to "Whose land is it?" was clear. It was firmly in the hands of a white elite, seized during more than a century of colonial and apartheid rule, and the Freedom Charter reflected the people's anger at the social hardship this imposed on the majority of South Africans.

Even if land had been acquired ‘legally' under the laws of the time, it makes no real difference. Discriminatory land laws, forced removals, the repressive apparatus of the state and the skewed distribution of wealth all combined to dispossess and to impoverish the African majority and enrich the minority whites.

The notorious Native Land Act of 1913 for example prohibited the sale of white territory to blacks and vice versa. Over 80% went to white people, who made up less than 20% of the population. The Act stipulated that black people could live outside the reserves they were restricted to only if they could prove that they were in white employment.

Surely no-one would dispute that this was theft and fully justifies the redistribution of land to which we as a country are committed. If you still have any doubts I beg you to read ‘The seed is mine', by Charles van Onselen, which brilliantly chronicles the life of a family of sharecroppers who were driven from their land and their livelihood between 1894 and 1985.

Before looking at the Expropriation Bill and how it will, or may not, redress this problem I think it is important to mention that battles over land ownership are not just a South African phenomenon. As capitalism fought to first crush feudalism and then conquer the rest of the world, it first had to destroy earlier systems of land ownership, usually with much violence. Thus we saw for example the enclosure of the common land in England, the Highland clearances in Scotland and the ‘winning of the wild west' in America.

Hollywood has glamorised these battles but the real story was one of settlers seizing the land from its original owners, the ‘Indians', and then defending their stolen land from later waves of immigrants from the poorer countries of Europe, portrayed in celluloid as ‘outlaws'. In all these countries and most others, the end result was a grossly unequal distribution of land which exists until today.

South Africa is different only in the unique way land ownership, like much else, was imposed by the state in a blatantly racist fashion. That is why land reform has been an even bigger priority than in other parts of the world. It has been a crucial component of the process of redressing the racial injustices inherited from colonialism and apartheid.

The 1996 constitution recognised the right of the state to expropriate land for a public purpose or in the public interest, and for the first time the right to have land restored. An important principle was that land reform should not be limited to the scrapping of discriminatory legislation; it had to involve "a major transformation of the whole legal system in order to restore rights to the land where possible".

The 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme set a target of redistributing 30 percent of agricultural land owned by whites to black ownership by 1999. By 2007 however government had managed to redistribute only four percent of that land and this target date had to be postponed to 2014.

The Expropriation Bill is therefore long overdue and fully justified. Nor is it exceptional. Every country, even those most wedded to the principles of capitalist free enterprise, have laws to enable the state to expropriate, or compulsorily purchase, land for the use of the state for a variety of social or security purposes.

There is general consensus, including from government, that the pace of land reform process is too slow. One of the main reasons is the willing seller-willing buyer principle. The problem with it has been that it assumes that there is a voluntary transaction between buyer and seller. It is clear however that willing sellers rule in the market place. They have a veto power by demanding exorbitant prices for their land, whereas the government, as buyer, has budgetary constraints.

This new Bill marked a welcome shift from this failed strategy and we hope it will soon be represented. Expropriation is now the only meaningful way the government can fast-track the land reform process, especially when blockages arise. Land reform must be enforced as part of a national strategy to reduce the huge and growing levels of inequality in South Africa, by redistributing land to the landless, and protecting those who occupy or use land but do not have formal recognition of their rights.

The Constitution is also clear that property is not limited to land and Cosatu believes that in order to deal with other socio-economic and developmental challenges facing the country, the state must play an active and direct role in the economy and that expropriation should also be used to:

• Renationalise all key strategic industries that previously to belonged to the state, including Sasol and Arcelor-Mittal Steel.
• Rescue businesses that cannot be allowed to collapse for national reasons especially where employers claim that their businesses are failing and they need to fire workers or cut their pay.
• Nationalise sectors that are specified in the Freedom Charter, such as the banks, monopoly industry, and mineral wealth.

Underlying all these arguments is a conviction that market forces cannot, and will never be able, to bring about the redistribution of land or other forms of wealth. Capitalism created the inequalities in the first place and will not be able to reverse them. Only strong state intervention can do that.

What then are the counter arguments? One is invariably Zimbabwe, which is an example of precisely how not to expropriate land. Like South Africa, Zimbabwe had a pattern of land ownership that was racially skewed in favour of the whites, but also like South Africa an economy that was highly unequal. What Mugabe did was solve the first while leaving the second untouched.

As a result rich white farmers were simply replaced by rich black farmers, many of them relatives or cronies of the ruling party elite, without any change in the overall redistribution of land and wealth to the majority of the people. The situation was compounded by the fact that most of the new farmer owners were not farmers, could not produce food and frequently evicted all the workers on their land, all of which led directly to the economic catastrophe in Zimbabwe at the moment.

There is a similar problem in South Africa with BEE. Although fully correct in principle, far too often, ownership of shares has been transferred to a small black elite and the majority of the formerly disadvantaged remain just as disadvantaged as before. That must not happen with land.

The other common counter argument is that the new land owners do not have the knowledge and skills to farm properly and that redistributed land will thus fall into disuse. This is a key issue, especially at a time when food prices are rocketing and we urgently need to increase the supply of food.

But that is certainly not an argument for retaining the status quo. What we need is to use more land for food production and stop turning our farms into game parks and golf courses.

That is why the state must oversee the process of land reform, plan it carefully to avoid the two extremes of on the one hand handing land to a new elite of big land-owners who will carry on as their white predecessors did, or on the other, giving the land to very small-scale subsistence farmers, who are then left to fend for themselves in a highly competitive market and are set up for failure.

The best solution would be for ownership to be shared as widely as possible, especially through the encouragement of viable community or employee co-operatives, with the plenty of assistance with start-up capital for tools and fertiliser and technical and scientific advice.

Let me finish where I started, with the Freedom Charter, which proclaims that:

• South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white;
• Our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;
• Our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities.

That is why we need an Expropriation Bill.

This is the text of the input by Patrick Craven, National Spokesperson of the Congress of South African Trade Unions to the Weekender debate on the Expropriation Bill, Wits University, 26 August 2008