In the land debate, 4% has become an abused number. In the past week, referring to the government’s audit of private land ownership, President Cyril Ramaphosa and Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane both stated that only 4% of commercial farmland is in black hands, evidence of the huge failure of land reform over the past two decades.
But the government’s land audit is possibly the least accurate and least helpful document on transformation published yet. That 4% is a stab in the dark is immediately obvious. The report states at the outset that companies, trusts and community-based ownership were excluded from the count. This excludes 61% of all privately owned agricultural land.
It also excludes from the count most land that has been transferred through reform projects. In early land reform, the settlement/land acquisition grant introduced in 1996 was R16,000 a household head, the equivalent of the housing grant paid to those in cities.
As this was not enough to acquire farm land, many people formed community property associations and pooled grants to buy farms. Much restitution also took place through the formation of these associations, which became the deed holders of the land. Being community-based organisations, these are excluded from the audit.
In later land reform from about 2009, with the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy the government stopped transferring title to land-reform beneficiaries, deciding instead that leasehold was a better option as it would prevent black farmers from selling out should they be unable to service their debt.
These farms remain owned by the state and as the government land-audit methodology is based on an analysis of title deeds by surname, they do not appear in the 4%.
Neither do an estimated 5,000 farms that the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has bought in recent years, but which it has not yet allocated.
The land audit is also not a helpful document as the part published in November 2017 focuses only on privately owned land.
An earlier land audit found that the state owned 14% of agricultural land.
Splitting the two up can lead to very misleading popular discourse: if black people own only 4%, then surely white people must own the rest. Therefore, 4% is definitively wrong. But what is right? The problem is that the more one looks at the issue, the less satisfactory the "facts" become.
AgriSA’s land audit, which analysed all transactions since 1994, is only a little bit more useful. Its data are based on an analysis of all transactions over land.
In 1994, it reads, the government and "previously disadvantaged individuals", which includes the owners of all tribal land, owned 14.9% of agricultural land.
By 2016, agricultural land had shrunk from 79% of the country to 76% as land was lost to urban development, mining and other uses.
The combined government, tribal land and land owned by previously disadvantage individuals had simultaneously grown to 26.7%. When this is measured not by land surface but by value, AgriSA’s audit argues that land transferred into black hands is 46.5%.
The combining of state land with tribal land and black-owned land creates just as much of a fuzzy picture of the success of land reform as that of the official land audit.
An approach by Stellenbosch University professor Johann Kirsten takes farmland under freehold tenure in 1993 (all white owned) and subtracts from that all the land that has been transferred through reform (using the government’s figures), the area of land for which monetary compensation was awarded; as well as an estimate of what has changed hands on the open market.
He calculates that white farmers have "lost" an estimated 13.7% of the land they held in 1993 with an additional 5% lost to agriculture entirely.
As the land debate proceeds and the value of expropriation without compensation is discussed and criteria determined for its application, these details will be important.
Details will also be important as the government has only one opportunity to take the population — both white farmers and black dispossessed and poor — along with it in shaping a new land reform policy.
To succeed, the ANC will need to distinguish its position from the EFF’s. The narrative that only 4% of farm land is in black hands will not do this. Instead it will shape the terms of the debate in a way in which only the EFF can win.
• Paton is deputy editor.
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