LANDLESS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT
NATIONAL COUNCIL

PRESS STATEMENT

"10 YEARS OF FAILED LAND REFORM IS ENOUGH!"

"LAND SUMMIT NOW!"

"FORWARD TO NO LAND! NO VOTE!"

"We are the people who have borne the brunt of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of the invasion of our land by the wealthy countries of the world, of the theft of our natural resources, and of forced labour for the colonists.

We are the people who have borne the brunt of apartheid, of forced removals from our fields and homes, of poverty in the rural areas, of oppression on the farms and of starvation, neglect and disease in the Bantustans. We have suffered from migrant labour, which has caused our family life and communities to collapse. We have starved because of unemployment and low wages. We have seen our children stunted because of little food, no water and no sanitation. We have seen our land dry up and blow away in the wind, because we have been forced into smaller and smaller places.

We continue to suffer under these conditions because the legacy of colonialism and apartheid has not been defeated in our areas. We continue to suffer from forced removals from our homes, from evictions – legal and illegal – from the farms we have worked for generations, and from gross violations of our basic human rights through abuse at the hands of the farmers who own these lands. We continue to suffer widespread injustices due to the racist criminal justice system in our areas that will not support us. We are the people who still bear the brunt of this legacy and the neo-liberal policies which today require us to buy back our stolen land and pay for services we have never enjoyed, while taking away our jobs and driving our young people into the cities. These are the biggest problems facing our country today.

We fought for the end of colonialism and apartheid, and welcomed the birth of a new South Africa. But for us there is nothing new because there is still no land, no services and no growth in our areas. We will no longer sit back and watch as the wealth builds up in the hands of a tiny urban elite, while on the edges of the cities, in the small towns and in the countryside, we continue to suffer and starve".

These are the opening words of the Landless People's Charter, the guiding document of the Landless People's Movement published shortly after the 23-24 July 2001 meeting of landless people that gave birth to the first national movement of poor and landless people since the Industrial and Commercial Union of the 1920s. These words also echo the statement of poor and landless people who attended the first post-apartheid gathering of the landless, the Community Land Conference in 1994, which aimed to provide guidance to the new government on ways to meet the needs of our country's poor and landless majority, and to convince the liberation movements then engaged in Constitutional negotiations that any concessions to protect the private property rights of the country's 60,000 white farmers, gained through 350 years of legal and military theft and barbarism against our people would cause post-apartheid land reform to fail.

Unfortunately, the voices of the poor and landless were not heard in 1994, and the private property clause was adopted to protect the colonial and apartheid grid of white property rights. And tragically today, on the eve of the 2004 elections marking the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid, this testimonial of the poor and landless majority remains unchanged, due to the total failure of the World Bank-styled market-led "willing seller-willing buyer" land reform policy adopted by the post-apartheid government.

The 1955 Freedom Charter said: “The land shall be shared among those who work it!; Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger; The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers; Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land; All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose; People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished.

The 1994 Reconstruction & Development Programme said: "The land redistribution programme must aim to redistribute 30 percent of agricultural land within the first five years of the programme. The land restitution programme must aim to complete its task of adjudication in five years."

10 YEARS OF BROKEN PROMISES ON LAND REFORM

Unfortunately, an entire decade has now passed with such marginal progress toward these goals that the post-apartheid land reform programme must be described as a total failure. The measure of success of a programme is not whether it has done anything at all, but whether it is showing signs of taking us toward our goal. The government's post-apartheid land reform programme is not even beginning to take us toward the initial goal of redistributing 30% of agricultural land to the poor and landless.

According to the government's own statistics, 10 years of land reform has transferred a total of 2.9-million hectares from 60,000 white farmers to 26-million poor and landless people. Our country's land mass is 122-million hectares, and about 85-million hectares of that is classified as agricultural land, so it is clear that the land reform programme has barely managed to scrape the surface of the task to transform our legacy of racially-skewed land ownership, redistributing just over 3% of agricultural land in 10 years. At this rate it will take at least another 80 years to reach the target of 30%. And it is important to note that even reaching that target will not bring us to a racially just distribution of land in a country with a black majority. It will only be a beginning.

While the government makes much of its progress in the land redistribution programme, the truth is that it is the smallest of the three land reform programmes, with the main projects of land redistribution and tenure reform affecting far more people and land. But even the government's restitution statistics show that the return of land to the landless is not a priority, with a full 57% of settled land restitution claims being resolved through paltry financial compensation, an option that landless people are often forced to accept against their will, and only 37% of claims leading to actual land reform. Worse still, only 13% of settled claims have been rural, while the government has settled 87% of the smaller and easier urban claims. The land restitution programme claims to have resolved more than 45,000 claims, but it has transferred only 810,282 hectares of land to the landless. This barely touches the overwhelming land question in South Africa. And the government says all other programmes together have only transferred 2.1-million hectares. This level of land reform delivery can only be described as an abject failure to deliver on the promises of land reform. In the meantime, the poor and landless have continued to lose land through ongoing farm evictions and urban forced removals.

The government's World Bank-style willing seller-willing buyer policy has now been tested for a full decade, and it has failed here even worse than it failed in Zimbabwe. As the Landless People's Movement, we have been calling for a national representative Land Summit to discuss the fundamental constraints to effective and comprehensive land and agrarian reform since our formation. We believe this is the only way to resolve South Africa's land crisis. The time for a Land Summit is now!

Earlier today, we as the LPM National Council met with Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza, and made the following demands:

· A national representative Land Summit to discuss the fundamental constraints to effective land reform in South Africa, and

· An immediate moratorium on all forced removals and evictions.

These demands have remained the same throughout the life of our movement. We have made these demands in several for a, and the Minister has herself promised us a Land Summit since she attended our first International Landless People's Assembly in Durban in August 2001 during the UN World Conference Against Racism, when we were waging the "Landlessness=Racism" campaign. She promised us a Land Summit again when we met her in November 2001 at the National Land Tenure Conference in Durban. Her Director-General of Land Affairs, Gilingwe Mayende, met us twice, in May and September 2002, to discuss this demand, and we explained to him in detail our aims for the Land Summit. More than a year has passed since those talks broke down.

Unfortunately, despite our fervent hopes that the approaching 10-year watermark on South Africa's democracy would ring home for the minister the importance of our demands, the minister instead could only promise once again to consult other ministers on our demands, and to report back to us by the end of January 2004. We sincerely hope that she and her government colleagues will urgently attend to this matter, paving the way for an immediate Land Summit, so that we can together lay the foundation for real land and agrarian reform in South Africa.

Despite this fervent hope, however, as the Landless People's Movement we have assessed the prospects for the Minister being able to deliver on the 30% promise before the elections, and we are convinced that she cannot do so. In light of this assessment, we have resolved that our "No Land! No Vote!" campaign to register the discontent of millions of poor and landless people with the failure of land reform will continue! We have learned the lessons of broken promises for 10 years now, and we will not be swayed from our path by mere election-road promises. We demand results, and if we get them we may be able to approach the next election in 2009 with a conviction that we have by then achieved more than mere "ballot-box" democracy. As the poor and landless majority of South Africa, it is our greatest hope.

ISSUED BY: THE LANDLESS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT NATIONAL COUNCIL ON 10 JANUARY, 2004

FOR MORE INFO: CONTACT LPM NATIONAL ORGANISER MANGALISO KUBHEKA ON 072-127-4055