The return of the African land to the African people

This year's most rewarding news from the South African Republic after the February resignation of former President Zuma is the land reform. It was brought to the world media by US President Donald Trump, who (in his typical style) twitted how he asked his Secretary of State to study South African "land and farm seizures" and "farmer killings".

"I have asked Secretary of State SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.”

What's new? - Expropriation without compensation

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At the end of the apartheid, some 60,000 agricultural holdings in the hands of the whites accounted for about 70 percent of the country's total area.

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Of course, the land reform does not have a connection. The reform itself has been slowly implemented since the founding of the first democratic government in 1994, a major change is that it intends to abandon the "willing buyer, willing seller" approach to date and prefer to use it as the guiding principle of "Expropriation without compensation", which potentially threatens the sanctity of private property and successful South African commercial agriculture.

However, the wider context and purpose of the land reform need to be understood. This was triggered by three objectives: the reimbursement of land that has been taken away from African communities and individuals since 1913; reallocating ownership into a more balanced pattern between whites and blacks and reforming proprietary rights. Few people in the SAR believe that reform is not needed...

But from here on, all the data on the progress and impact of the reform are very very blurry.

The land survey, carried out by the Ministry of Rural Development in 2013, revealed that 79 percent of the state-owned land is privately owned, including land owned by individuals, companies and funds, and all urban real estate and agricultural and mining land in South Africa. Some sources state that since 1994, a total of 17,439 million hectares of white ownership have been transferred as part of the land reform, which is 21 percent of the 82,759 million hectares of agricultural land in free trade in South Africa. With the help of the market, the land reform is expected to bring the objective of redistributing at least 30 percent of agricultural land into the hands of African farmers, so a change in the functioning of the reform is unnecessary. Due to the change in the methodology of the census, bad cadastral records and also the private transactions that are not covered by any of the white traders and African buyers, the exact division of the soil along racial boundaries is not known. However, most of the agricultural land is almost certainly still owned by the whites.

A farmer inspects his crop in Limpopo, South Africa

Massive manipulations

Unclear picture of the situation, of course, allows variety of misleading. The ultra-right-wing groups advocating the seizure of farms and the agrarian revolution interpret the figures as "less than 10 percent of white people still own 80 percent of the country," which of course is not true, but sounds like a good basis for expropriation without compensation. On the other hand, there are groups such as AfriForum, which advocates the rights of minorities in the SAR (but in reality represents the interests of the Africans), who recently issued a list of 195 farms that the government intended to seize shortly without foundation.
This has triggered a panic among landowners, the international condemnation of the reform, the fall of the currency and Trump's tweets about the seizure of farms and killers of white farmers. But perhaps it is even more important that the talk about expositions began to create expectations among the poor population, and how they will finally get some land. Which has resulted in the movement of several groups of illegal immigrants to several groups of people who expect to get that land.

Pre-election populism

Radical changes in the economy are predicted ahead of every election. Their government is more than ever worried about how it will prove in national elections next year. Regardless of unequal land ownership allocation in the SAR, the loss of agricultural productivity as a result of a failed reform (as happened in Zimbabwe for example) would only increase inequality in South Africa. President Ramaphosa is aware of this, but at the same time he can not get a certain measure of populism in the pre-election period. Most of the proposals for radical changes will emerge shortly after the announcement of the election results. Therefore, it will be interesting to see what the land reform will take in a year.

Read more onBrookings.edu and TheAtlantic