Though reconciliation and social cohesion remain elusive without significant economic change, OSIAME MOLEFE finds that effective land redistribution could increase the pace of these processes.

It has been known from the beginning that national reconciliation would be impossible without economic redress. It is known, too, that it is impossible to talk about economic redress without talking about land reform. But for many reasons – the lack of political will, the need for economic stability, concerns about food security, to name a few – the discussions and actions around land reform have largely been ineffective.

The recently released green paper on land reform is the latest attempt at getting this process back on track. It rightly takes the view that ‘social cohesion, just like development, is a direct function of land access and ownership’, and sees the state as playing a central role as an investor in the transformation of land relations.

To give real-life applicability to how land access and ownership have a direct impact on social cohesion, one need only look at the recent spate of so-called service-delivery protests. The chairperson of the Western Cape anti-eviction campaign, Mncedisi Twalo, says that the violence that gripped Hangberg near Hout Bay, and many other townships around South Africa, was not about service delivery, it was about access to land. Twalo says that the lack of economic development and land reform has resulted in massive migration from underdeveloped, mostly rural areas to large urban centres. The land invasions that cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town have battled with, both in the courts and in the streets, are a direct result of this pattern of migration, which has resulted in a build up of poor black people on the fringes of urban centres.

Statistics South Africa’s reports on inter-provincial migration since 1994 have shown a consistent pattern. Gauteng and the Western Cape have had positive net migration and the other provinces, especially the Eastern Cape, have had negative net migration. Over the past 17 years, this pattern has put strain on the development resources available to the two provinces and their major cities, and the resulting social problems have done damage to social cohesion and set back reconciliation.

In a way, despite the abolition of influx control laws and the natives land act, the geographic and socio-economic makeup of the country’s urban centres has remained largely unchanged from that created by apartheid. Skirting each city are poor, landless black people who commute into the city centre for work and return to their  underdeveloped townships at the end of the day. The makeup of our cities, admittedly, has changed slowly to reflect an increasingly more racially balanced pattern – mainly as a result of the small but growing black middle class – but it would be incorrect to draw inferences on reconciliation from this.

It has become commonplace to say that the inequalities that exist in South African society are no longer polarised by race, but by class. This is taken as evidence that significant progress has been made with reconciliation. This view is problematic because it masks a still fractured society whose racial disharmony seeps out in other ways. Cape Town’s corporate sector, for example, is still dogged by accusations that black people are marginalised and treated unfairly. Whether this is true or not does not matter as the mere perception of systemic racism within a sector so large is enough to damage social cohesion.

Another example of how the masked racial disharmony has seeped out is the departure of black business organisations from Business Unity South Africa (Busa), an organisation that was supposed to represent black and white business interests in a unified way. The black organisations – disgruntled over how the face of business in the country has not changed – quit the partnership and re-established the Black Business Council as an organisation that stands apart from Busa. In fact, the tone of the interaction between the two so far has been such that elements within the Black Business Council see themselves not only as set apart from but also as adversaries of Busa. Even among people of the same social class, racial disharmony and distrust still exist.

Besides, suggesting that reconciliation has grown because inequality is now on the basis of class is completely meaningless – inequality by class is no more desirable than inequality by race. Both do nothing to bring about social cohesion.

The role that land reform can play in reconciliation is huge. It has the potential to address the push and pull factors behind the post-apartheid pattern of inter-provincial migration, and can also address the inequalities reflected in urban geography. This, in fact, is one of the green paper on land reform’s stated objectives. Land reform, when effective, also bolsters poverty alleviation efforts.

What has thwarted the process so far is the view that land reform is a zero-sum game; that one group’s gains are only possible at the expense of another’s. This has been the root cause of the failure of the willing-buyer/willing-seller approach. Land, as an asset and as a resource, is one that few give up easily even in a competitive market. The scarcity of prime agricultural land and questions on the availability of an equally robust alternative asset (into which proceeds from a land sale may be reinvested) weigh heavily on the minds of potential sellers and, as has often been seen, act as a disincentive to selling.

The green paper attempts to address the willing-buyer/willing-seller problem through partnerships with commercial farmers on a risk-sharing basis, and sets up a land management commission to coordinate, advise and regulate land reform. It also sets up agri-villages that allow farm workers to own houses and have access to agricultural land.

Whether these proposals are enough or if they can be effective will be debated during the green paper’s consultation period. But what is clear is that the tone of debates on land reform needs to change. Many understand the policy is necessary, but seem to disagree on the technicalities. However, the degree of disagreement has been so great that it has delayed the process at both the policy formulation and implementation stages. What appears to have been lost in the debate is that further delaying the process further defers reconciliation and will result in a lose-lose scenario for everybody concerned.

Osiame Molefe is a freelance writer.