ARnet Regional Report Southern Africa 1998

Regional Report on Southern Africa
National Land Committee (NLC)
Rome, February 1998

Overview

Throughout southern Africa, land is presently not only one of the most defining political and development issues, but also perhaps the most intractable. Contemporary land regimes in the region have been shaped by a long and often violent history of land dispossession that followed colonialism and large-scale immigration by European settlers into the region.

Within this common past, the land patterns of old colonies were shaped by the particular exigencies of their colonial masters. In the case of South Africa and Zimbabwe, British imperialism left a dualistic structure that segregated the African majority into "native reserves" or communal areas, and kept the most productive land for European agrarian and industrial interests.

A pattern of internal colonialism was established, wherein developing nodes of industrial, mining and commercial agriculture extracted resources, primarily labour, from a poverty-stricken and underdeveloped countryside. In lusophone colonies like Mozambique, the economic weakness of the Portuguese State and its attenuated administrative apparatus encouraged colonies to be carved up by large, virtually sovereign concessionaires, and left Mozambicans subject to forced labour and compulsory cultivation. Elected post-colonial governments came to power to varying degrees on the promise of land reform. Once in power they have, therefore, had to confront dramatically skewed and unequal patterns of land ownership, associated landlessness, ineffective rural production and high levels of food insecurity, congestion and overuse of available land, with resultant degradation of water, soil, forests and other natural resources. The urgency of these issues is sharpened by the extent to which the sub-continent is subject to recurring droughts and other cyclical disasters.

But new governments also have to deal with growing urban unemployment and the demands of international donor agencies and finance institutions. Thus post-colonial states face pressure to reduce the role of government in the economic life of each country, with an adverse effect on potentially radical agrarian reform programmes. Structural adjustment programmes have included strong pressures for land ownership patterns and tenure systems to be shaped by the market. This threat to communal tenure is further compounded by the liberalisation policies demanded by the push for foreign investment. The combined result has been to subject southern African countries to a new land grab by both foreigners and indigenous political elites, at the expense of the security of the rural poor.

It is within this context that the regional overview paper examines the success and failure of agrarian reform in three countries of the region: South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It looks at the history of land dispossession and outlines the different land reform programmes that have been adopted in each of these countries. The paper then highlights key issues regarding the prospects for improving access of the poor to productive resources. This involves a critical examination of government interventions and capacity to achieve stated reform objectives. It also explores the strength and capacity of civil society to shape effective reform programmes and associated development initiatives. The role of the market in shaping land reform programmes and policies adopted by the state and civil society in each of these countries is also examined. Finally, some promising civil initiatives are presented along with a list of the critical factors that shape the prospects for success or failure of these initiatives.


South Africa

A central element of colonialism in South Africa was the dispossession of indigenously held land by European administrations and settlers. This process of alienation culminated in the land acts of 1913, which laid the basis for South Africa's distinctive pattern of racially unequal land ownership, and all but destroyed independent African peasant production. The 1913 laws and subsequent practices confined African land rights to small and marginal territories, culminating in the apartheid era concept of ethnically defined labour reservoirs on the fringes of the country's industrial and commercialised agrarian zones.

Against this background, the post-apartheid government regards land reform as a key initiative to redress unequal patterns of resource distribution. Driven by the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), the new government has planned, legislated and begun implementing a complex package of land reform measures. Broadly, the land policy has three components.

Restitution is designed to restore land ownership (or provide compensation) to those who were dispossessed without adequate compensation by racially discriminatory practices after 1913. The institutional machinery to implement the programme includes provincially based restitution commissions and a land court that acts as final arbiter in restitution cases.

Redistribution has the broad objective of correcting the racial imbalance in land ownership. Under this programme, the state provides grants of up to SAR15,000 (c.US$3,000) per household to buy land and, occasionally, additional planning assistance. Nine provincial pilot projects seek to implement redistribution in a way that provides the rural poor with shelter, economic opportunities, food security and environmental sustainability. Controversially, as earlier in Zimbabwe, the South African constitution entrenches existing property rights and thus effectively removes expropriation as a tool for state-driven land reform. Instead, redistribution is based on market mechanisms or "willing-buyer-willing-seller" principles. As the rural poor depend, primarily, on the state grants to purchase land, this is essentially a mechanism for using public revenues to buy land from former owners where the latter are willing to release land to the market.

Tenure reform is designed to provide security to all South Africans under diverse forms of locally appropriate tenure. This reform includes an initiative to provide legal recognition to and formalise communal land rights in rural areas; and a recently legislated programme to strengthen the rights of tenants on mainly white owned estates. In addition, there are far-reaching water law reform measures, designed to remove private riparian rights and restore ownership of ground and river water to the state so that these resources can be allocated more equitably. A number of forestry reform measures are also in place.

Resistance to land expropriation was a feature of South Africa's colonial and apartheid periods. However the African National Congress and its allies were largely urban-based movements rooted in the concerns of township residents and the organised working class. With some exceptions, the organisation's leadership came from these groups which were the most vocal and best organised. Rural resistance, largely due to the difficulties involved in organising in remote areas, was consequently less prominent. This situation continues to prevail in the rural areas where civil society is weak and there is a lack of resources for organisations to push land reform from below. It can also be argued that the new government's commitment to a neo-liberal macro economic programme has helped to slow down land redistribution which, as we have seen above, depends essentially on state spending to be achieved. The result is that, despite the favourable press that South Africa's land reform programme has attracted because of its comprehensive nature, it remains essentially a state driven programme reliant on limited state resources being injected into a land market with high prices. The relative demobilisation of civil society means that pressure from below is diminishing, thus removing strong incentives on the state, which faces demands for fiscal discipline, to release more resources for redistribution. The result is a generally disappointing level of progress despite fine policy intentions.


Mozambique

Access to land in Mozambique has long been contentious, but is now perhaps more complex and conflict-prone than at any other time. In most areas, competing claims to land have emerged, reflecting the complex movements of population and shifts in economic and political policy over the last 50 years. The advent of a market economy (from 1987) and peace (in 1992) have fuelled a land rush that exploited or by-passed inadequate land access laws and registration services. Mozambique is particularly targeted because, with half of its 40-million hectares of arable land uncultivated, the country is the largest pool of available land in southern Africa. Also, three decades of war mean the state is no longer able to regulate resource access across this vast country. In an atmosphere of confusion and corruption, opportunists who seek to exploit the country's prodigious resources often supplant genuine investors.

Concurrently, five years of peace and a new dispensation have enabled the 80 percent of the country's 17,5-million people who are of rural origin to return home, in a massive land re-occupation managed almost entirely by customary systems. It is this recovery that is increasingly threatened by land resource conflicts. The limited sway of central government, violence and intimidation, and the co-option of demoralised local officials, have left smallholders little able to defend their resources, especially given their limited organisation and access to the law. However, initial results from the current survey show that smallholders are beginning to fight back, at times with support from emergent institutions of civic society.

Given this situation, government is engaged in a profound policy review and has initiated a process of debate and legal reform. Civil society has played a prominent role in this regard, particularly in the shaping of the recently adopted land law. Whilst the new law has shed much of the earlier socialist phraseology, it continues to shun international opinion by rejecting privatisation. All land continues to vest in the state, but for the first time the law recognises land rights acquired through occupancy. In a major departure from earlier law, verbal evidence is accepted as proof of occupancy - a breakthrough in a situation where 62% of adults are illiterate. The law further defends peasant rights by specifying that no titles can be granted without first consulting local communities. Title deeds may be granted to individuals, communities and businesses and may be transferred or inherited, but not sold or mortgaged. Commentators have argued that although the law includes provisions which could enhance tenure security for smallholders, achieving this will depend on clarifying ambiguities through appropriate changes in the accompanying land regulations and strengthening the capacity of rural people to take up the new opportunties.

Against this background, several important civil society initiatives have emerged. A major recent thrust of civil society action has been the attempt to defend the resource rights of smallholders, particularly by securing land titles on behalf of rural associations. The provisions of the new land law are likely to intensify this process whereby NGOs support peasants in their attempts to secure their tenure. During the same period, certain NGOs, particularly national organisations such as ORAM and UNAC, moved away from attempts to resolve individual cases to concentrate on issues of policy and legal reform. They played a crucial role in shaping the new land law and must continue to play a vigorous advocacy role if the further legal and administrative reforms required to consolidate the recent gains are to be achieved.


Zimbabwe

Faced with growing population pressure, illegal squatting by landless farmers, and unemployment, the new government of Zimbabwe was under pressure after 1980 to deliver on its promises of land reform. But in securing more land, it was initially restrained by the Lancaster House Agreements, which required that it purchase commercial land only on a "willing-buyer-willing-seller" basis. Land reform thus remained market-led, and resettlement barely kept pace with natural population growth in the communal areas.

In 1997, the government announced its intention to abandon market imperatives and seize more than 1 500 commercial farms for redistribution both to landless peasants and to aspirant black commercial farmers. Past experience suggests, however, that many of the seized farms would go towards paying patronage to local party political allies. It also indicates a shift in government thinking on land reform: from radical reforms to alleviate poverty and need, to making land available for an indigenous middle-class. Whether pressure from international finance agencies will force the government to back down, remains to be seen.

In communal areas too, government shapes agrarian reform. Ownership of all communal land remains vested in the president, with the councils set up by the District Councils Act serving as the cornerstone of rural government, regulating land holding and use. The result has been a complex system, with competing hierarchies often leading to conflict over land and authority. To devise more efficient utilisation of land, the government has appointed a Land Tenure Commission, which published its final report in 1995.

The commission recommended that state ownership and distribution of communal land be abolished. Instead, traditional villages would be recognised as the basic unit of social organisation, with land, water and natural resources the purview of elected local assemblies. Communal land would be surveyed and households issued with registration certificates for arable and residential land, and villages would receive certificates for grazing and other common land, held in trust by the headman. This has been influenced by the CAMPFIRE process, which emerged in the early 1980's as an alternative way of ceding control over natural resources to local populations. The government has declared that these recommendations would form the basis of a new Land Act - however, this has not appeared on the statute book yet.

Recent events have again located the complex interaction between the state and the market at the heart of Zimbabwean land reform. Civil society institutions, however, are also involved in a range of important initiatives to reclaim land, formalise and improve land rights, and promote access to and sustainable use of common property resources. Such initiatives have a particular role to play in extending the impact of agrarian reform to those groups traditionally on the margins, like women. While women constitute the majority of agricultural workers, they have suffered from limited access to land, and for them the issue is often less one of tenure, than of security of tenure. All land is considered the property of men, and even inheritance practises tend to favour the oldest son at the expense of the wife. In trying to secure resource user rights and the promotion of natural resource sharing, NGOs and other civil initiatives are also attempting at the local level to fill the gap left by development policies that are bureaucratically determined, rather than community driven.


Promising case study

There are a few resettlement villages scattered on the fringes of the far northern Kruger National Park where, if you were to visit, you might hear some of the old Shangaan women singing while they go about their daily chores about the impact that wildlife conservation has had on their lives. The haunting beauty of the melody disguises the sadness of a song that recalls how 3000 people were forced in 1969, at gunpoint, to burn their own homes whose ruins still litter what is now the Pafuri section of the world famous park. "Don't be deceived," it says. "Our hearts are sore because of poverty. Don't be deceived because many of us are dying. Even if you take us back only a few will be able to return. Because the rest will be dead."

The Makuleke people were forcibly removed from the northern areas of what is now the Kruger park. During December last year the Makulekes, who live in the far north of South Africa near the Zimbabwean and Mozambican borders, reached a framework agreement with the country's national conservation agency that places them at the cutting edge of land reform.

The new agreement does two bold things: It returns title to the Makuleke people over some 20 000 ha between the Luvhuvu and Limpopo Rivers, an area that contains by far the highest biodiversity in the entire park. The Makulekes, in return, guarantee to use the land in a way that is compatible with the protection of wildlife and not to occupy it or farm or undertake any activities that would undermine the conservation objectives of the park. The Makulekes have full rights to commercialise their land by entering into partnerships with private investors to build game lodges and camps as long as these are consistent with the wildlife management policies of the parks board. A few years ago Gilbert Nwaila, a member of the Makuleke Tribal Authority, had this to say: "This game reserve has served no purpose to people. It served a purpose, I am sorry to say, only to whites and not to the people living with the park." The new deal is set to change such sentiments. The principles contained in it are probably unprecedented internationally in terms of promoting co-operation between a protected wildlife area and the people who live on its borders. It provides a strong incentive to manage the land according to sound conservation principles and gives the impoverished Makuleke community access to a valuable commercial resource. The main paper presents this and a range of other promising case studies drawn from initiatives throughout southern Africa.


Regional Knowledge Network

A workshop held in South Africa to discuss the establishment of a regional network confirmed the need for greater interaction and knowledge sharing among civil society initiatives in the region. While acknowledging that all the countries in the region had an important contribution to make on agrarian reform, the meeting identified South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as national nodes worthy of close scrutiny. The process of administering questionnaires to a spectrum of civil society groups in these countries, from the national down to the grassroot level, revealed some of the obstacles faced by agrarian reform on the subcontinent. The particular time period (November to January) was, for instance, exactly when peasants in Mozambique had to concentrate on producing corn rather than forging coalitions and answering questionnaires. In South Africa, virtually the entire country shuts down for an extended summer vacation. Zimbabwe was wracked by civil upheaval. In all countries, the shifting nature of local structures, lack of telecommunications, and isolation hampered efforts to reach grassroots organisations.

Nevertheless, the regional and national nodes dispatched some 200 questionnaires, and have had a return rate of approximately 15 percent. Completed questionnaires have allowed the regional and national nodes to identify some of the more interesting civil society initiatives in each country, which will be discussed at some length in the regional overview paper. The activities of the Knowledge Network come at a time when the slow pace of effective reform has invigorated plans for the creation of new regional and national land organisations for the poor. It is vital that the Knowledge Network devises plans to engage with these new civil society initiatives in the region.