Sometimes in the national debate you just don’t know where to start. Perhaps the best way to start is to just put your cards on the table: I have to say, I’m terribly disturbed by the way the land debate is unfolding.
The ANC, its supporters and many of my own colleagues have been falling over themselves this past week to urge that I should be reasonable and rational and should not at all "panic".
It’s funny how when people tell you not to panic you just know it’s definitely time to panic. Yet, in a way I agree. White South Africans should not panic; racial minorities have a way of choosing the most paranoid interpretation (until it turns out to be true, in which case they weren’t paranoid enough). It probably won’t turn out as badly as they imagine.
I actually think the people who should panic are black South Africans, but we will get to that. White South Africans need to understand (as they do) that political pressures cannot be ignored, and shouldn’t be. The political process is there precisely to allow political aspirations to emerge and for corrective policy to follow.
Land-ownership statistics are nowhere near the skewed levels the ANC and the EFF claim (blacks own outright about 4% of agricultural land but in fact control, through tribal trusts, more land by quantity than whites) but it is still massively out of proportion to the demographic, for reasons we all know about. It’s hardly surprising this form of inequality has erupted onto the political agenda.
What we all want, and what the ANC claims to want, is for sensible policy to emerge to fix the problem. Yet this is not the way it is unfolding. There is a terrible sense of cognitive dissonance because land is of great symbolic value, but if all the polls are to be believed it is low on the list of real popular needs. In more than 90% of the land-restitution cases communities have sensibly opted not for the land but for the money.
Everyone knows there are only about 35,000 operational farms in SA, so even if they were all expropriated, 99% of black South Africans would get absolutely nothing.
What has happened is that the ANC is being rushed into taking radical steps it knows in its heart will be destructive because it keeps getting out-manoeuvred by the EFF, which is desperately looking for a new populist election tool now that its previous one has retired to Nkandla. That is the reason for the panic. And panic is totally justified because the worst policy choices are almost always made when politicians get desperate. Desperation is the midwife of blind, irrational and impulsive action in politics and in life.
We know the ANC is torn between its head and its heart on the issue because the construction of the resolution on land made at the policy conference was simply bonkers. There was a terrible, late-night battle and in the end the party put two completely incompatible notions on the table. "Conference resolved that the ANC should, as a matter of policy, pursue expropriation of land without compensation. This should be pursued without destabilising the agricultural sector, without endangering food security in our country and without undermining economic growth and job creation," it said.
The way the ANC is dealing with the EFF is instructive because it is so obvious to me that they are putty in the hands of their tiny political adversaries
An enormous number of well-meaning people, including many of my colleagues and white friends, have claimed these ideas are actually not incompatible. There is a way, they protest. Good-hearted whites, of which there are in fact an enormous number, are caught in a devil’s cleft — to oppose the ANC-EFF land alliance would be to inadvertently side with horrible racists on the right, so they feign positivity. Everything will be alright.
Trust me, it won’t. And the reason it won’t has nothing to do with "panic" and everything to do with logic and history. It’s not just what happened in Zimbabwe, although one would hope South Africans might have noticed that our neighbour destroyed its economy and now has 90% unemployment, not by reclaiming land necessarily but by destroying property rights in the process of reclaiming land, the very thing the ANC has just endorsed. The EFF’s version is at least clear: it wants the state to nationalise all land, black and white, urban and rural, tribal, residential and the rest.
I can’t help wondering what tribal leaders think about this, but the young, urban black professionals who form the core of the EFF really don’t care about them. This is similar to what the EFF also wants with the mines.
I always thought of the EFF as a kind of left-wing party, but this week it hit me: they are fascists. And as if to punctuate the point, the EFF’s commander-in-chief (a designation any fascist would be proud of), Julius Malema, said: "Whites must be happy we are not calling for genocide". But, really, don’t panic.
The way the ANC is dealing with the EFF is instructive because it is so obvious to me that they are putty in the hands of their tiny political adversaries. The ANC instructed its members to vote in favour of the EFF’s motion — interesting in itself — but proposed amendments. As it turns out, the ANC’s amended motions were passed with some of the caveats it included in its conference resolution.
But interestingly, not all. There will be a land-reform programme that includes expropriation of land without compensation, making use of all mechanisms at the disposal of the state, "implemented in a manner that increase (sic) agricultural production, improves food security and ensure that the land is returned to those from whom it was taken under colonialism and apartheid…." What disappeared was the "without undermining economic growth and job creation" portion.
I don’t know if this was an oversight or a negotiated decision, but what it shows is there is a growing realisation that this is going to cause job losses and stunt growth. But we are going ahead anyway.
Malema just waved the changes through, pretending to support them. He knows they are meaningless; this is about politics, not law.
At the heart of the debate is a deep ideological cleavage: are property rights a hindrance or a help? In this and other matters, the ANC-EFF implicitly claim they are a hindrance, which is why they think they can’t do it without snatching property without paying for it.
This is a desperate, terrible, historic mistake.
Taking something without compensation destroys the value of the asset not only for the person from whom it’s taken but also for the person to whom it’s given.
By definition, it has only a kind of symbolic value. That is why modern economies are built on property rights. Property rights are not there to protect property owners necessarily, even though they do; they are there to protect value. It’s now a very demonstrable fact that when poor people get freehold rights to their residential property, they are financially boosted in exactly the same way as rich people are. It’s so obvious you would hope even politicians would get it.
What are the real solutions? They are barely worth talking about now because they have so little chance of being implemented. But for the record, in the best of all possible worlds the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution have to coincide. Land reform is a huge problem and done properly it would take time. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. And it would happen, as it is happening now, with state help, through the market and outside it.
To all the people who say "we want our land back", and it’s a "sin" for land ownership to be so unfairly distributed, I would ask one question: let’s assume, as I do, that this is fundamentally true. But have SA’s white farmers really done nothing for us or the country over the past 400 years? Isn’t their "original sin" at least somewhat mitigated by the fact that we have been able to eat our own food all these years? And export it by the shipload?
My apologies. My mistake. There is no "our" anymore. That hoary old dream of Nelson Mandela is now truly gone.
What we are left with is "us". And "them".
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