The emotive land issue came under the spotlight on Wednesday when former president Kgalema Motlanthe hosted his Chilean counterpart Ricardo Lagos in Johannesburg.
In a dialogue about advancing economic growth in SA, Motlanthe bemoaned the “costly compromises” that were made during the negotiated settlement that ended apartheid and ushered in democracy in 1994.
Comparing notes with Lagos, Motlanthe said the compromises, which he described as mistakes, stifled SA’s transition and threatened to reverse gains because “we have deviated from the direction mapped out by our leaders”.
“SA was made up of four province, we then decided to increase the provinces to nine [but] if you check the boundaries of the [nine] provinces, they mirror the boundaries of the former homelands. Politics of identity have now gained currency and this makes our transition complicated.”
Motlanthe said SA was back at square one where prominence was given to tribal affiliations, and “this does not help in our quest for nation-building”.
Another mistake was that former homeland leaders wanted a future SA to be a federation in the hope that they could preserve their homeland fiefdoms.
“Of course that was defeated in the negotiations. The Ingonyama Trust was established to preserve one part of the homeland,” he said. The trust controls 27.9% (29-million hectares) of KwaZulu-Natal land and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini is the sole beneficiary of the Ingonyama Trust board.
In November 2017, a panel led by Motlanthe recommended that the Ingonyama Trust be repealed or substantially amended to protect existing customary land rights.
In its report released in July 2019, the presidential advisory panel on land reform and agriculture recommended that the Ingonyama Trust be dissolved and the legislation governing it be repealed or reviewed.
The recommendations have incensed the king, who wields substantial influence over voters in the province where the ANC won the 2019 provincial election with a reduced majority.
Motlanthe said section 25 of the constitution was meant to address the land question. “But section 25 expects that parliament will pass a law of general application to give effect to the resolution of the land question. Such a law has never been passed up to this day. Instead we find fault with section 25 and yet that is not where the horse is buried,” he said.
The National Assembly agreed to re-establish a multiparty ad hoc committee in July to initiate and introduce legislation amending section 25 of the constitution, or the property clause.
The amendment of the constitution was meant to ease expropriation of land without compensation to address skewed landownership patterns dating back to the apartheid and colonial eras.
The decision followed parliament’s adoption of the report of the constitutional review committee on review of section 25 of the constitution in December 2018.
Motlanthe stressed that the negotiated settlement that brought about democracy in SA was arrived at in the spirit and understanding that “we were now, not only liberating those oppressed, but the oppressors [as well]”.
“Today we are back in 1993 as if 1994 didn’t happen, partly because of how we have deviated from the direction mapped out by our leaders [and] partly because of the material reality that we actually have two countries in one bottle. One is developed and the other not developed,” he said.
EFF leader Julius Malema caused a stir by saying at the Oxford Union in the UK in 2015 that Nelson Mandela had turned his back on parts of the revolution after his release from 27 years in prison.
Lagos, who was president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, said to effect change a country’s socioeconomic policies also needed to change. They should be sensitive to equality, taxes and investment.
Lagos said after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s iron rule they managed to reduce the poverty rate from 43% to 10% and lower the extremely poor rate from 22% to 3%. Unemployment was now at 7%.
“Democracy has to deliver,” he said to loud cheers from the audience.
SA’s unemployment rate is at 29%, with 18-million people depending on social grants for their livelihoods.
Motlanthe said with the economy in the doldrums SA needed to think of creative ways to exploit its natural resources “to lift us out of the morass we find ourselves in”.
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