Someone recently told me that he didn’t really care what happens to land, because it does not belong to him. Such statements are not only ignorant and insensitive, but also very dangerous.
This person is obviously a city dweller from Pretoria, with a home in a suburb. Why should he then care about a farmer’s used or unused land somewhere in the countryside? Or about people who invade state land in suburbs and start building houses there? Or about payments to claimants who never receive the land? Well, he should care. If he doesn’t feel strongly about it now, he will regret it later.
The reality is that the problems of the two most tragic contemporary case studies – Venezuela and Zimbabwe – both started with land. It later extended to all kinds of tyranny and calamities, but everything started with the violation of property rights and failed land reform. Eventually it became the whole country’s problem because people in cities like Caracas, Harare and Bulawayo also had to queue for food or go hungry because food was unavailable. The ANC uses these two disasters as a type of lodestar and model and regularly express their admiration for them. Deputy President David Mabuza recently visited Venezuela to show their support for the Venezuelan dictator Nicholás Maduro and his regime.
Zimbabwe
Land had been a thorny issue even before Robert Mugabe became President in 1980. “Land was a pressing issue,” writes historian Martin Meredith in The State of Africa. However, the transition from a white minority government to a black majority government was accompanied by the condition of “willing buyer and willing seller”. Mugabe reluctantly agreed at Lancaster House not to expropriate for ten years.
Paul Kenyon writes in his book Dictatorland: The men who stole Africa, that Mugabe had firmly placed this issue on the election agenda in 1990: “It makes absolute nonsense of our history as an African country that most of our arable and ranching land is still in the hands of our erstwhile colonisers.”