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The ANC tried to soothe farmers on Wednesday after a call by its youth league for the constitution to be changed to allow land to be expropriated without compensation and a warning that Zimbabwe-style land invasions loomed.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said the party wouldn’t endorse a land grab, as ANC Youth League deputy president Ronald Lamola said would happen unless whites surrendered their land.
“It is not the ANC policy to expropriate land without compensation, and personally I don’t think it will work,” said Mantashe.
He was speaking after a meeting in Joburg on Wednesday between the ANC and commercial and emerging farmers.
Mantashe said the ANC would discuss land redistribution with the youth league so that its concerns could be addressed at the ruling party’s national policy conference at the end of the month. “It will not be helpful to engage in violent polemics (with the ANCYL) in the run-up to the policy conference. The conference will address land reform in detail,” Mantashe said.
He said the party was discussing how to ensure food security with established and emerging farmers .
The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, among others, has singled out the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach as the biggest hindrance to achieving the land reform target of transferring 30 percent of agricultural land to black farmers by 2014.
It has proposed in its Green Paper on Land Reform to create an office of a land valuer-general to determine a fair price for land acquisitions.
Lamola warned white South Africans on Tuesday that “whites must voluntarily give up their land if they don’t want to see young black people flooding their farms”.
AfriForum’s legal representative, Willie Spies, said Lamola’s comments amounted to hate speech.
“Lamola specifically referred to, among others, ‘the Van Tonders and the Van der Merwes on farms’ and warned that their safety cannot be guaranteed,” the organisation said.
Spies said AfriForum intended to lay charges against Lamola at both the Equality Court and with police.
Youth league spokeswoman Magdalene Moonsamy said it would not be intimidated and was unapologetic about land reform. “We re-affirm the statement made by the deputy president of the youth league that those who continue to hold land which was illegally and immorally taken away from the indigenous people of South Africa must voluntarily co-operate with the ANC-led government to ensure swift and equitable redistribution of such land to the masses of our people,” she said.
Moonsamy said: “The call of the ANCYL, members of the ANC, the trade unions and South Africans in general for the speedy return of our land and our birth right has never, today, nor will it ever, require approval from unpatriotic white farmers and landowners.”
She added that if necessary “we are prepared to fight with all that we have for that which our people should have”.
She said the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle had failed the people of SA because of greed and at the expense of millions of landless people.
The DA called on the government to reject the youth league’s call.
DA spokesman on rural development and land reform Athol Trollip said any assault on land rights would compromise national food security and job creation.
Political Bureau
The Guardian 