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The subject of this letter is a matter of much interest and public debate at the moment, and corruption in government is the root cause of our scepticism to agree with such an amendment.
With this in mind, to even consider taking over white-owned land as “black economic freedom”, is a suicidal enterprise reminiscent of the tragedy of the Nongqauze Amaxhosa national suicide episode during the colonial era of Sir George Grey in the Cape Colony.
Some readers in your paper are supportive of this enterprise – although cautiously advising it should be done carefully, not through populous chants of “economic freedom in our lifetime” and rightfully so.
However, before we can even go there, let us look at our economic situation brought about by wasteful expenditure – which in Thulas Nxesi’s Public Works Department alone runs into more than a massive R1.2 billion in one financial year. Such graft notwithstanding, we are considering the review of Section 25 of the Constitution to put into effect white-owned land grabs, albeit not Zimbabwe style. Before we do that, I refer the reader to the foreword of The History of the Land Bank: Financing Agriculture for 100 years (2013, Pretoria, South Africa), edited by Dr Japie Jacobs.
In this book’s foreword, the chief executive of the Land Bank in 2013, Phakamani Hadebe, authoritatively notes that “the purpose of history is to inform the present, in so doing, shape the future”. Hadebe unveils and reminds us of the fateful 1913 Land Act and Sol Plaatje’s shocked reaction to it. He goes on to explain how the Land Bank in a discriminatory way, empowered tertiary industry favouring white farmers only. The bank financed the buying of land by white farmers when South Africa was still a union. For 100 years (1912 – 2012) the bank financed white farmers and today through tampering with Section 25 of the Constitution we want to reverse that with the flip of a coin.
The History of the Land Bank (page 103) has it on good authority that to establish the target of emerging black farmers requires government assistance over a long period; meaning that, after expropriation, time will pass before government intervention.
Second, the high price of land is another complication, which expropriation without compensation apparently seeks to remove.
Lastly and most importantly, is the escalating cost of farming equipment worsened by the limited national resources in the national treasury; weakened even more by corruption and poor planning.
Furthermore, costs incurred to enter the agriculture industry make it difficult for beginners to financially survive the entrance phase, which one black farmer recently demonstrated by his inability to pay a R40 hospital fee for one of his injured farmworkers.
This is reflective of the futility of land expropriation without compensation as a solution to black post-apartheid economic freedom aspirations.
We need to realise that it takes years to gain economic liberation and the multimillionaires created since 1994 can only be National Lottery winners – not created through hard work – or, of course, through corrupt means. It requires emancipation from a state of dependence for self-reliance to be rich.
The apartheid state, whose political theme then President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania captured in his ujamaa philosophy (education for self-reliance), went into overdrive to prepare the whites of this country to rely on the self, through an education system that nourished scientific knowledge.
Armed with this, the apartheid state empowered whites-only and through the obnoxious Verwoerdian 1954 Bantu Education Act - that ZK Matthews loathed so much he resigned his Fort Hare University post - prepared the Bantu, as we were called, to be drawers of water to irrigate white farms at pittance slave wages, ensuring that we reported for work the next day for a sack of mealie meal for pap and wheat for bread.
Money for development went into planned national developmental enterprises and not wasteful expenditure. Perhaps it was divine planning for this to happen so we can be witnesses of post-apartheid economically ruinous corrupt activities. We can see what Hadebe meant when he said the Land Bank contributed to its discriminatory goals by “raining down financial aid exclusively on white farmers”, when post-apartheid rained, and still does, financial aid on corrupt activities that sees our government run to courts of law and a few profiting from the fruits of liberation.
Let us let this divine revelation (if it be that) be an eye opener to correct our wrongs.
Our education system should first impart skills (not certificates infested with maths literacy) that will prepare our learners to be self-reliant for a national scientific economic development.
Let us review the democratic state’s financial ability in the treasury to finance the Land Bank so it can sustain emerging farmers beyond discriminatory spectacles.
Let scientific career development in our schools identify learners with farming in their blood before entrusting part of the national budget to their farming skills.
This, and only this, will help avoid the national grave that expropriation without compensation will become in the short and long term, until our poor are buried in hunger, deprivation and poverty. Let us be mindful of the fact that as the petrol price goes up, so does hunger, deprivation and poverty.
The taxi industry is unable to increase fares because salaries are still what they were prior to fuel increases – which affects even the paraffin the poor cook with.
This reality must hit us as hard as the poverty that is presently shrinking the government grants the poor collect – whose paltry R10 increase is aimed at buying votes in 2019.
Before we can even begin talking about land expropriation without compensation, let alone the tasteless vaulting ambition of a constitutional amendment, we must sweep corruption out of government departments. And when Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane begins to do her job, and stops taking us for fools, only then can we table for discussions amending Section 25 of the Constitution.
• Benjaminn Seitisho is a City Press reader from Qwaqwa
