The government is fighting to appeal a high court ruling that compels it to sell an elderly black Limpopo farmer the land he has been leasing from the state for nearly three decades.
The decision by the department of land reform and rural development to seek leave to appeal Pretoria high court judge Norman Davis’s ruling in favour of 79-year-old cattle farmer David Rakgase comes after the Constitutional Court slammed the government for its inability to properly implement its own land reform programme.
The appeal also clearly shows the government’s incoherence and the sharp contradictions that exist in its land policy.
Rakgase won a precedent-setting court victory earlier in September that could have profound consequences for black farmers like him, who have spent decades being refused the right to buy state land they have lived and worked on, and have instead been offered long-term leases by the state.
These leases, offered under the state’s “Proactive Land Acquisition” strategy, strongly suggest the state is intent on pursuing land nationalisation as a mechanism of land reform, one advanced not only by the EFF but also by former president Jacob Zuma.
By contrast, President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly stated that the ANC “rejects the notion” of the state owning all of SA’s land.
“Land is an asset that people want to have in their hands so that they can work this asset,” he said in an interview with eNCA in 2018. “We’re going to embark on an agricultural revolution that’s going to empower our people to work land effectively.”
But the exact opposite appears to have happened in the case of Rakgase, whose farm was allegedly invaded in 2016 as a direct consequence of the state’s insistence that he continue leasing the land for another 30 years. Rakgase told Business Day that those who invaded the land were adamant he had no valid claim on it, because he did not own it.
Davis accepted that the state had offered to sell Rakgase the farm he has been leasing since 1991, in 2002, under the now discontinued Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, and that it had then failed to transfer the property to him after he agreed to buy it.
He found that a “breach of the state’s constitutional duties had occurred” in its handling of Rakgase’s attempts to buy the farm it had offered him.
But, in a leave to appeal application filed on Friday, the department of land reform argues that it was only in 2010 that the state’s land disposal committee agreed with the provincial grant committee’s approval of funding for Rakgase to buy his farm. It insists that the grant committee had no power to approve the actual sale.
It says Davis was incorrect to blame the minister of land reform for the 17-year delay in Rakgase’s application to buy the farm being processed, as he had only received the land disposal committee’s recommendation nine years ago.
During his evaluation of the state’s attempts to justify why it had not honoured its 2002 promise to sell Rakgase his land, Davis said the government’s argument that Rakgase had “security of tenure” and faced no imminent prospect of eviction with the long-term lease that had instead been offered to him “smacks of callousness and cynicism, particularly given our country’s historical deficiencies in dealing with land reform”.
Davis said Rakgase’s advanced age justified his decision to order the state to sell him the land now.
But the government insists the judge was wrong to reach this conclusion, as other members of Rakgase’s family had applied for grant funding to buy the property and he was “not the only possible beneficiary of the farm”.
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