“We have 238 people there; we plough, but not very much,” chief Lekoko Montshioa said at a hearing in Mahikeng of the Native Land Commission chaired by WH Beaumont, six months after the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act. “We mostly herd cattle there; we value that land, because there is plenty of water there and it is good grazing land,” the chief said.
Mosita, the area the chief was referring to, was considered to “not be suitable for native occupation, (as) it is a desert and there is no water”. Fifty-five years later, in 1968, his people would be removed from the bountiful lands they had occupied since the 1500s to a new settlement. In 1996 they lodged a land claim to be restored to their land, which was granted in 2020 under section 2 of the Restitution Act.
This month, which marks 110 years since the passing of the landmark 1913 Land Act, there is renewed furore over draft regulations for the licensing of water, published last month. Established agricultural interests are concerned by the 50%-75% equity requirements for those hoping to access licences for water sources of 500,000m³ or more.
I say this because the equity requirements for applicants with requirements of less than 500,000m³ (25%) are even lower than the long-standing minimum land ownership target of 30% in the agribusiness broad-based BEE scorecard.
More than three-quarters of all existing water licences sit with white individuals and firms. This in an ownership context where more than a fifth (23.5%) of the more than 37-million hectares under individual ownership are held by black individuals and another 23.2-million hectares is owned by firms. Yet not every hectare so counted has water resources.
It is true that there has been a marked decline in the number of farming units in the postapartheid period, but this fails to account for why transfers of ownership and concentration were not subjected to “public interest” considerations within the industry by organised groups, especially in cases where these land parcels are found on abundant sources of a licensed public good like water.
Rather than an opportunity to pander to a doctrine of fear of food riots, this is a moment to consider how ongoing consolidation and concentration in commercial agriculture can be mitigated in the public interest. Large is not always better under all conditions, least of all in the more equitable “mixed economy” we are all hoping to build.
In such a context, distribution of land and water rights must move alongside other agrarian enterprise development alternatives that are worth considering, such as supply chain transformation (via offtake and procurement) benefiting land reform beneficiaries, long-term leases to black farming groups, or any similar equity equivalent programmes linked to meaningful value chain participation.
Limited land
Too many African farmers, existing and prospective, have land parcels too small to incentivise large-scale cultivation and the progressive application of scientific methods of production. It is these producers who are stuck, even with land, in a poverty trap. Any meaningful land reform must not confine the scope of the policy debate to marginal pieces of state land or remote parcels disconnected from water and other network infrastructure.
This episode is a timely reminder that more than a century and a decade after the passing of the Land Act, land reform is not just about the land but also the terms of access to other instruments of production, natural resources and input markets crucial to making a success of any agricultural undertaking.
It would be a hollow victory for many communities engaged in decades of land struggles for the restoration of land, for that advance to be unaccompanied by water rights to encourage cultivation and animal husbandry and diversification towards other agrarian income sources. Without meaningful access to such a public good the associated programme of land reform may move once again towards the desert with no oasis that so concerned chief Lekoko Montshioa over a century ago.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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