Has anyone read "The Great South African Land Scandal"??

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excerpts (again) Chapter III, part 3:

We saw two farms which had turned into squatter camps – the farm Lisbon which used to be a successful dairy and grain farm of 2 000 ha and which was given to the Khambi Tribal Authority, and the once-productive dairy farm Wanbestuur, around 200 ha, now belonging to LandbouKrediet. Jabulani Mdlalose has already sold a good portion of this farm, which he doesn’t own, to squatters. The crime emanating from these farms is endemic, said our farmer driver.

The farm Mooifontein was in even worse condition that the previous two. The fencing had completely vanished. The house was vandalized and what could be taken away was removed. The owner did not live on the farm, but the manager moved off because of the intimidation. Here again, Jabulani sold plots for R1 500 each. The outbuildings had been stripped. This farm under normal circumstances – that is in a normal law-and-order society - would fetch R2 000 per hectare. Today it is worthless.

Farmer Jan Hattingh (not his real name) told us he practically gave away his top farm for R1 000 a hectare to a black farmer who obtained a loan from the Land Bank. The farmer farms a few of his private cattle and uses the farm as a taxi repair operation. He said no white farmer would buy his farm because they simply cannot produce.
We asked a land claims expert in the area what was the basis of the land claims on these farms. His reply was that the Mdlalose community were “landless”. We didn’t have time to count how many farms the Mdlalose clan had already been given in the area, but they have claimed – and received - at least ten farms that we know of.

We drove back to Vryheid with heavy hearts. What can farmers do, we were told. With government allegedly supporting NGO’s who instigate and support land claims (even if the claims are not valid, which happens in many cases!), and with the police literally turning a blind eye, there is no other way than for a farmer to pack his bags and leave the heartache, the fear and the stress.

One reads of successful and happy farmers in South Africa’s agricultural magazines. These are the ones who do not live near squatter camps and traditional areas. But as farmers near these areas leave, the cancer invades further into commercial farmland. Will anyone eventually be safe?

As we neared the town, a squatter camp on a hill came into view. On the other side of this camp, 500 m away, lay the Klipfontein Dam which supplies the town with its drinking water. So where is the sewage arrangement for these people, we asked. There’s nothing at all. When it rains the sewage runs down into the dam. The squatter camp land belongs to the State, we were informed by the Department of Water Affairs. And once again, the Mdlalose’s are involved. We were told that Johannes is the “agent” and is selling plots in the squatter camp. Agent for whom we could not ascertain. The Department of Water Affairs says they have received no complaints about the dam, so they cannot investigate the claim about run-off sewage. So where does the sewage go to, we asked? Upon enquiries to the local municipality, we were informed they were “aware of the problem."

 

[OrangeEmpire]

 

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Chapter IV, part 1:

Chapter IV THE EASTERN CAPE

And that here, in this farthest nook of Southern Africa, we were now about to receive the portion of our inheritance, and to draw an irrevocable lot for ourselves and for our children’s children.’

- From the publication Narrative of a Residence in South Africa by Thomas Pringle, in which he tells of the trip to South Africa of the settler ship Brilliant which arrived in Algoa Bay, in the Eastern Cape, on 15 May, 1820, as quoted in The Story of the British Settlers of 1820 in South Africa by Harold Edward Hockly, Juta and Co., Cape Town, 1948.

An examination of publications of the “homeland” era reveals the diversity and breadth of projects introduced to the Eastern Province – irrigation schemes, dairy, beef and sheep farming projects, the construction of dams, crop farms including maize, wheat, lucerne and vegetable plantings, as well as sorghum and legumes grown under dry-land farming conditions. Up to 1975, 61% of the old Transkei was agriculturally planned. There were 14 agricultural cooperatives, with 16 600 members. By June 1975, more than 1 300 dams had been built and 1 100 successful boreholes drilled. More than 600 soil conservation schemes covering an area of 2 300 000 ha had been approved by March 1975, and 922 dipping tanks had been provided for livestock.
In the old Ciskei, only 837 ha owned by black farmers were under irrigation by 1975. Of the total surface of about 520 000 ha, 81% consisted of pasturage and agriculturally non-productive land, and only 15% of arable land.(6) The story of the old Ciskei is even worse than the old Transkei in terms of agricultural development at the time of the 1976 Africa Institute report. For example, the total number of fruit trees planted by black farmers up to 1975 amounted to 48 100. (On one Letsitele commercial farm alone, there are more than 100 000 trees.)

“After 1994, the people on the land were mobilized to destroy everything that belonged to the boer or the homelands government”, we were told by a source. “Tractors, irrigation systems, furrows, dams and so forth were trashed”, he said. “The promised new revolutionary tractors and irrigation systems never materialized. The people who live on this and other such schemes which used to produce crops for export, now live in abject poverty.” He continues: “The government is now ploughing millions into resuscitating these schemes. However, most of these millions go to consultants or failed former commercial farmers. Such people now masquerade as agricultural development professionals and/or fundis.”

His father was murdered on the farm.” Wylie’s sick father was shot in his bed, while Wylie escaped another bullet in the room by a whisker. “They took R220. My father was killed for R220! This killing changed our lives forever.”

Farmer Willie Fourie, who used to own Glen Craig, a substantial farm adjacent to the commonage, had his fourteen camps vandalized and his water system wrecked – naturally, he sold to the Department of Land Affairs. Only Peter Wylie and one or two others have resisted the pressure. He says people shouldn’t excuse the behaviour of certain people because of their race. “There is no excuse for lawlessness. We live on our nerves here. The public doesn’t understand the effect this siege has had on our attitude to life”.

His neighbour across the road is reeling under the pressure. “It’s terrible to see a man’s life, everything he believes in and dreamed about, shattered by unmitigated crime”, says Wylie. “Our dreams for the future are in ruins. Everything is stolen – peaches, cabbages, other vegetables. The young thugs come with bags and simply take, not to eat but to sell.

They invade my farm and other areas. I often wonder what would have happened in the homelands if the Israelis or the Thais or the Malaysians had got hold of those regions and farmed them. Today, those regions would be a paradise. It’s all about attitude, the work ethic, an approach to life.”

People want jobs and a roof over their head, not land. People should not be dumped willy nilly on to land from which they cannot make even a basic living. It should be borne in mind that 90% of whites don’t know how to farm either. Landlessness isn’t the problem, unemployment is. Why not allow those who can successfully produce food for the whole country to get on with their job?

Note: (There are many more stories in this chapter detailing the total failure of the plans of the marxist inspired ANC government of the noted Nelson Mandela who is greatly lauded in the USA but where oh where is it ever mentioned how the ANC has failed his own peple miserably and has the unstated racist policy of slaughtering the whites??)

For instance: The history of the tea estate follows a pattern now becoming apparent: when the new government came to power in 1994, they moved to rid many old “homeland” structures of personnel from the old regime. Affirmative action candidates and political comrades replaced what was an efficient band of people, whatever their political affiliations. Thus the rot set in. The plantation was already in trouble in 1997 and was liquidated. The state pumped in R10,6 million to get it back on its feet, and in 1998, the workers became co-owners of the estate in a land reform initiative, funded by South Africa’s taxpayers.

The Magwa estate would cost in excess of R1 billion to re-establish. In his letter to the Minister of Land Affairs dated 19 September 2002, MP Stuart Farrow said the estate’s production levels had fallen dramatically; husbandry practices were not being implemented, professional tea management was deficient and there was low worker/owner participation, with reliance more on casual workers.

A “top secret” memorandum dated 21 April 2003 to the Eastern Cape Cabinet Committee from the Head of Department, Department of Agriculture – EC, entitled “Magwa Tea Estate Restructuring”, refers to persistent labor disturbances, low productivity, and frequent requests for working capital since the “takeover of the company by the workers”.

Says the top secret report: “A fundamental agreement was reached at the time the workers purchased the company (in 1998) that the organization should be turned around and transformed into a shining example of a worker-owned and managed company.”

“Productivity has dropped to unprecedented levels and all the parties involved (workers, management, board of directors) are accusing one another of mismanagement, non-communication, weak leadership and, in some instances, sheer laziness”. The report goes on to catalogue lists of problems, and there is copious finger pointing. Suffice it to say the whole project collapsed into a management and financial shambles, and this occurred over a period of at least three years.

The report makes mention of the further amount of R20 million set aside by the province to implement a turnaround strategy. But the socio-political factors inherent in the failure of management are frankly admitted to: that “the failure of a project of this magnitude will have great negative implications politically”, and that “other struggling enterprises such as North Pondoland Sugar, the TRTC Bus Company, etc” could also have “a political fallout”. The report also includes letters from top estate employees resigning in protest at the mismanagement of the company. These professional and dedicated people had to implore the company’s board to pay their six-month salary arrears.

Another case briefly: Sri Lankan Henry Galahitiyawa is one of the world’s top tea experts and has been employed at the estate since 1989. In June 2003, he told the press “hardly any work is being done – and it is being done at a very slow pace.”(10) For some time he had not felt safe and feared for his family. Ransacking of houses had occurred and he concurred that there were clear signs of anarchy within the estate. He chronicled the woes of the estate since the workers/shareholders took over. He said strikes, mismanagement, incompetence, fraud, corruption, nepotism, and even liquidations could not kill Magwa until now, “but even immunity has to have an end.”

This dedicated non-South African world expert declared that the “inevitable demise of Magwa” can be attributed to the “too rapid transformation from a government-owned plantation to a people’s cooperative in 1997, which change precipitated all the other woes. None of those placed at the top possessed the required qualifications or knowledge to transform effectively and to motivate all those who are involved in production.” Yet again, a multi-million rand project which the present government inherited from the previous administration has bitten the dust, due mostly to the arrogance of the ignorant and the misguided belief that they need answer to no one, especially to the taxpayers whose money they use with impunity.

 

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Chapter IV, part 2:

Nowhere in the world has this type of worker “management” succeeded – in socialist countries it failed spectacularly, yet the South African government either did not learn from history, or refused to learn. Threats to destroy the “legacies of apartheid”, and wild promises to bring “the people” into management to “share the wealth” have almost destroyed this showcase project.

Another failure of Mandela marxist inspired central planning land reform;The old homeland books say that this scheme “will cover 3 600 ha by 1977 and 1 200 farmers will be settled on it when it is fully developed”. It cost R8,2 million to set up in 1975.

Today, no more than 500 ha are irrigated, and are planted with cash crops. Contractors recently planted 500ha of maize for government at a production cost of R10 000 ha. The selling price of the maize was R800/R900 a ton which works out at around R8 000 per ha. Thus this particular operation made a loss of R2 000 per ha. The Eastern Cape government spent altogether R5 million on this maize project, and managed to produce R400 000 worth of maize. “One might just as well have imported R5 million worth of maize and have been done with it”, said a farmer nearby.

Another; The Shiolo Project

This was in the old Ciskei, a 600 ha intensive farming project of mainly fruit. It costs today around R40 000 per ha to establish a fruit orchard. Many of the trees in this project were cut up for firewood and for use in building houses. The government is now ready to pump another R10 million into this scheme.There was also a small dairy operation within the project, plus a small-plot development. After 1994, the whites were removed and the budgets “were frittered away” according to a person we spoke to. There is no production at all at Shiolo. All the machinery, the tractors and so forth, is lying around, broken and rusted.

And yet another; Cala

A beautiful peach tree project with gravity irrigation was established at Cala in 1999. However, the trees were not looked after and one third of the orchard has burnt down. The irrigation nozzles and pipes were burnt and have not been replaced. A weir was built and the government brought experts in to help with the planting, and the orchard was fenced off. The beneficiaries were given R500 000 to maintain the trees until maturity. It was all on a plate. All they had to do was open and close the valves. However, within seven months, the land around the trees was burnt.

The weir is now clogged up. It was positioned to take advantage of gravity irrigation, but now steel pipes and rubbish have been dumped in the weir. We were advised that the beneficiaries of this peach tree project attended management and technical courses. Despite this, they call the Department of Land Affairs at the drop of a hat when even the smallest thing goes wrong. Technicians have to drive 200 km to undertake a 10-minute repair job.

As in the rest of South Africa, there is no end of examples of farm handovers in this province which have failed. We need only mention a few. Farms Deeside, Drummond, Spes Bona, Ensam, Kanuna, Mt. Hopley and Poplar Grove were all sheep and cattle farms in the Queenstown area. They have now become squatter camps. Some pit toilets have been built. The residents overgraze the land, and their cattle are dying because of this and the drought.

A nearby farmer tells us the new owners of these farms are unable to make a living and steal his irrigation equipment and his sheep.

We often see the word “hope” used in these eulogies to the latest land reform transfer. While hope springs eternal, it is usually discovered to be ephemeral. (Expecially in Marxist ANC controled South Africa)

So it is with the handover of the 780 ha farm Merino Rust to Mr. Felix Mtwa and his 17 village compatriots who “became commercial farmers last month, having bought the property from a white rancher on a Land Affairs grant”, according to the Times.

The article proceeds to describe the success of the Department of Land Affairs’ Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) scheme which is funded, inter alia, by USAID (the US Agency for International Development) in cooperation with the AgriLink project.

A local farmer who knows this land well tells us “nothing is going on there, nothing”. The property was a mixed-farming operation, with a sizeable beef herd, a small dairy and good crop production. There was flood irrigation from two dams, but now the canals or furrows are not cleaned, so the water doesn’t come so easily. There are “a few families” on the property but there’s no real production, says the neighbour. “I was there four months ago and nothing much was happening”. The new arrivals moved into the house and they appear to be living off grants.

There is a long list of further reasons why things don’t work in the Eastern Cape, including lack of resources in provincial agricultural extension services, immature NGO’s, complicated political processes and poor communication between different government agencies. In other words, there is scant praise. The Eastern Province is racked by deep poverty (in the country’s most fertile agricultural area), unemployment, incompetence, corruption and profligacy. (The province gave more than R1 million to help fund the royal wedding of a Thembu chief to Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini’s daughter).(20) Money is pumped into “projects” but there’s not much to show for it.

The Eastern Cape is beset with cholera (275 water tanks were brought in during mid 2003 to Qumbu to prevent its spread)(21), and an old lady tells the Sunday Times the “new generation” doesn’t want to farm. “They do not want to work. They just go up and down, drinking all the time”.(22)

In February 2003, it was reported that the Eastern Cape failed to spend more than an eighth of its budget in its last audited financial year – because it didn’t have the managers to spend it, or the planning to know how to do it.(24) However, in some sectors the province spends with alacrity. The EC Department of Agriculture has “excess staff”. In 2000 already, MEC Max Mamase said there were 4000 “superfluous” staff and they swallowed up nearly 25% of his department’s budget (25).

Yet people are “starving to death on arable land.

Postscript: WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO A SOUTH AFRICAN RESEARCHER

In October 2002, two researchers set out to conduct a study on the challenges surrounding land and agrarian reform on former white-owned farmland in the old Ciskei, now the Eastern Cape. Ms. Michelle Cocks from the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Province and Dr. Ilsa Grundy from the University of Stellenbosch, Western Cape were found the following day severely injured and left to die on an isolated piece of land about two km from a primary school near Bell. One woman had been tied to a tree.

Ms. Cocks, married to Mr. Tony Dold, was pregnant at the time. She and her husband had tried for two years to conceive. Despite her pleas to her attackers, they savagely kicked her in the stomach and her baby died. Both women were cruelly beaten and kicked. At one stage doctors feared that they would not survive their ordeal.

Mr. Dold was naturally bitter. “Unfortunately we live in South Africa. We must protect ourselves against these savage animals. These attackers must have seen my wife was pregnant but that didn’t deter them. It is nonsense that poverty is always used as an excuse. I have been in twelve African countries much poorer than here, but crime is under control there. Our country has changed. It is no longer what it was ten years ago.”

 

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Chapter V:

Chapter V KRANSKOP

Kranskop farmer Günther Gathmann has lost a total of four members of his family to farm murders. His brother Walter was killed three years ago, a second attempt on his life. His aunt, his cousin and his uncle were all victims of a pandemic which places South African farmers as the world’s most murdered group, outside of a war.

At the age of 88, his mother was beaten, pistol whipped and shot at during the first attack which narrowly missed Walter. The Gathmanns farm in the middle of a battleground where their community, mostly descendants of German missionaries who settled in the area in 1854, has decreased from 56 farming households to 14 over the past 28 years. Eleven farmers have been killed in the area, and no robberies occurred.

If those who perpetrate the theft, the intimidation and the murder have as their agenda the intention to drive farmers off their land, then they can be judged successful. Sixty two farms in the Kranskop area have been claimed under South Africa’s land claims legislation. In September 2002, a highly-charged meeting was held to try and calm the tension which had built up after a protest march the month before: a memorandum was handed to authorities which gave “all white people” one month to leave the area.

The first whites came to the area in 1824 .......

Gathmann says he and his fellow farmers are being taxed “into extinction”.

Gathmann says the farmers had to give details of their properties to the authorities and must pay tax on the value of their farms, whether or not the farms make any profit.

There is also the water tax which, on the face of it, seems punitive. Gathmann says he has a 212 ha forest and he must pay for the rain on his forest. He is taxed on his catchment dams, whether they are full or not. This “rain” tax comes to R36 000 per annum.

A farm worker and his friends stole a complete verandah worth R25 000, on Gathmann’s property. The employee sold the verandah, but only received a suspended sentence. He is still on the farm because Gattmann cannot get rid of him.

This is what farming in South Africa has been reduced to under the present government. In a lengthy article on Kranskop in February 2003, Farmer’s Weekly quotes one Gertrude Mkize saying “All the land will be ours soon, I believe”. Indeed, this will happen if things continue as they are now. When four members of your family have been murdered, for how long is it worth while continuing?

Farmers have been impounding cattle since the early 1900s, while the Zulus retaliated by slaughtering the farmers’ animals. Thus began the antagonism which has waxed and waned ever since. In February 2003, Hohls estimated that his fellow farmers in the province abandoned at least 250 000 ha of prime commercial farmland since 1995. Today, it could be more, but nobody’s calculating these days.
“Encroachment is the right word”, he says. “They put their cattle in, then they cut the fences, then they start stealing your crops, forcing you to leave your land. And then they say: ‘Oh well, there’s vacant land, let’s move on to it’. It’s a very subtle way of stealing land”.(7) In Kranskop alone over the past few years, 14 commercial farms of more than 10 000 ha have been abandoned to masses of squatters.

More than 7 000 people are murdered in KZN per year. The 1998 murder of farmer Friedel Redinger is linked directly to a land dispute, according to the ISS. In 1997 a chief lodged a claim on his land, and Redinger agreed to donate some land and began negotiating. In the spring of 1998, three young men stopped Redinger’s bakkie on his way home. He recognized them as members of the local Community Policing Forum and got out of the vehicle. He was shot in the back of the neck, on his knees, point blank, says his brother Walter. “It was a clear execution”.(10)

The young men who killed Mr. Redinger were neither aspirant farmers nor community representatives, said ISS. “They appeared to be animated by a wild and disturbing political identity”.(11) Young black men are responsible for the crime, blacks and whites agree. They are the real rulers of the tribal areas. They live outside the parameters of the law.

Death threats are endemic. Hohls has been threatened many times. Friedel Redinger was threatened before his death. Hohls has laid several charges of intimidation with the police, but nothing has materialized. Farmer Andre Swanepoel also received threats because he tried to stop people from illegally settling on his farm.

And once again, as in many parts of KwaZulu/Natal, a chief appears to be behind the campaign to drive the whites out, according to farmers.

Some describe Joseph Khathi as The Great Instigator and The Terror. He was heard saying at a meeting that “it is an accepted fact that the white man hates the black man”, and this has incited racial tension. (The Dunns of northern Natal complain of exactly the same thing). Although Khathi denies saying those words, he admits helping to write the memorandum calling for the removal of the whites.

These men of the midlands live in two different worlds. Versions of history differ markedly and, it seems, never the twain will meet. It is an insoluble problem when commercial farmers (who supply the food for South Africa’s 45 million people) are harassed off their farms by people who cannot even feed themselves.

There seems no logic behind the campaign of hatred against white farmers, but then what is logic if it is not culturally defined? Is Robert Mugabe logical? Is it logical to place hundreds of squatters on a productive farm, when nobody wins? Is subsistence farming logical in this day and age? And is it logical that the SA Police Service, so desperately needed to stem crime not only in the rural areas but right throughout South Africa, should be so emasculated and overwhelmed, while money is spent on private jets and arms deals in a country not at war with an outside force?

When power is in the hands of those who encourage this destruction of the commercial farming sector by its inability or unwillingness to act, or even its passivity which condones the lawlessness, then what will happen to the beloved country?

 

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Chapter VI, part 1:

Chapter VI THE DUNNS OF KWAZULU/NATAL

Jonny Steinberg’s book ‘Midlands’ - about a farm murder in the Natal midlands - is an excellent piece of investigative journalism. It gets to the heart of the terrible schisms in the daily life of rural communities. Steinberg waxes lyrical about Alan Paton’s introductory paragraph from Cry, the Beloved Country:

“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke, and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa”.

The famous American talk show host Oprah Winfrey has “discovered” South Africa. She told her audience recently what a beautiful country it was, one of her favourites. She then donated Cry, The Beloved Country to everyone in her audience. Clearly, she was intoxicated with Paton’s expressive prose, and his eloquent descriptions of the land of the Zulus. It is indicative of the drastic changes that have taken place in our country that Paton’s widow has left South Africa – she was mugged and departed in disgust at what she called a rampant crime wave. Moreover, Paton’s beloved Natal is reverting to a savage battleground of souls and bodies which Steinberg has evocatively portrayed in his book.

Of all the provinces in South Africa, KwaZulu/Natal is the most shocking in the ferocity of its antagonisms. The evil which now permeates the rural areas is pernicious and seemingly inexorable. Land invasions, intimidation, murder, theft, arson, rape and assaults – these are the hallmarks of a province which seems to be out of control.

Ms. Pat Dunn, descendant of nineteenth century British settler John Dunn (who married several Zulu wives) is a victim of just about every “gross violation of human rights” which Amnesty International defines. She told our researcher she had written to Chief Gatsha Buthelezi to complain about the behaviour of his people, where youngsters are adrift in a sea of disrespect for life and property, and where tribal warlords kill and intimidate at will, with little chance of conviction and incarceration.

His reply on 26 November 1998 expresses “distress” at the situation but he simply advises Ms. Dunn to take the matter to court. “As a descendant of King Cetshwayo who gave the land to John Dunn, I find it unacceptable that the descendants of Dunn should be robbed of their rightful inheritance”. Since 1998, of course, things only worsened.

The new South Africa has not been kind to the Dunns. Pat left South Africa in 1971 to escape apartheid. She settled again in this country in the mid nineties, and she is shocked at what she finds. She and her family have battled for over 100 years for their land, land which was given to her forefathers by the Zulu chief Cetshwayo. After 83 years, the Dunn family eventually received title to the land which was theirs by right of inheritance. This land area, situated in a narrow coastal strip between the N2 highway and the sea, immediately to the north of the Tugela River, has historically been owned and farmed by the descendants of John Dunn and his Zulu wives. It adjoins, to its north, a “reserve” area known as Macambini Tribal Authority, headed by a chief Inkosi Mathaba. By the early 1990s, Mathaba, an IFP strongman, was widely feared, and linked in numerous reports to widespread violence in the area which left many dead or injured. This resulted in hundreds of people fleeing their ancestral homes. Mathaba was subsequently found by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to have been among prominent provincial leaders responsible for deploying hit squads, leading to “gross violations of human rights, including killing, attempted killing, arson….”

Under the direction of Chief Mathaba, people started moving on to the land owned by the Dunn descendants from 1993 and by the mid 1990s, the illegal invasions had gained momentum, and the occupants were building solid structures. (2) Local farmers – the Mangete Landowners’ Association of which Ms. Dunn is chairman - applied to the High Court for an interdict to halt the invasions. This was never finalized because Chief Mathaba lodged a land claim in terms of new legislation (Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994). Thus the interdict was put on hold until the finalisation of the land claim.

Despite the fact that the claim was weak, and was declared so by the Land Claims Court, Mathaba didn’t relinquish it, and the matter dragged on. All the while, illegal invaders continued to move on to the Dunns’ farms. (The invasions took strength after the 1994 elections). Some of these illegals had come from far away, including one family which had been displaced by the violence perpetrated by another chief further north.

(Note; 'violence further north' rings a bell, the original Dutch 'Boer' settlers were in what is now known as 'South Africa' fully a hundred years, a century before the first member of the warlike Zulu tribe ever set foot on the land.)

The legal property owners and their families, among them the Dunns, were subjected to murder, rape, robbery, threats, intimidation and arson. Sugar cane crops were regularly burnt, especially in the dry season. Ms. Dunn told us she had been burnt out five years in a row, and that her harvest had been well below normal. The local Community Hall, built by the farmers without government help, was destroyed by fire. Dunn appealed for police help, but nothing was done.

She has been threatened telephonically – “once they brought a coffin to a meeting which Chief Mathaba addressed and which I attended. On the side of the coffin was written ‘Pat Dunn’. The coffin was marched to the cemetery and burnt.” She continued: “We have had numerous robberies and break-ins. They came one day looking for work. They took our revolvers and took what they wanted.” “They took my car – it was found burnt out on the highway. The second time, they killed one dog and poisoned the other one. Four armed men shot my husband and they beat me so badly they broke three vertebrae. I think they were sent by Mathaba. It’s back to the jungle here. I have lost all respect for the Zulus”.

The police were called in, but nothing materialized.. (This phrase was repeated to our researchers right throughout South Africa). “The police go through the motions”, says Ms. Dunn.

The youngsters commit the crimes and they are fed the story that the Dunns stole their land by the older chiefs. It’s a distorted view of history, says an angry Ms. Dunn. Mathaba is the epitome of evil. (In March 2001, it was reported that the N2 highway was built through his tribal lands. Despite the fact that he already had 30 000 ha of land, he told the roads department he had nowhere to settle the families who had lost their land to the road.. The department then bought four of the Dunn farms to resettle those displaced by the road. Instead, Mathaba settled his family on the farms and claimed that he personally paid for them!)(3)

The Dunns don’t know how many squatters are on their land. “They occupy any land that has not been planted”, declares Ms. Dunn. “We found it hard at the beginning to raise funds. We struggled. We were not white enough for the previous government, and now we’re not black enough for this one. We are treated with contempt.

 

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Chapter VI, part 2:

(The ANC government makes many grand statements about taking action to the right thing but then does absolutely nothing at all rather than make statements geared to placate the NY Times and other such enablers as the BBC.)

This type of behaviour has become a hallmark of the present government. Promises to “look into the matter”, to “come back to” the complainants, to appoint a “commission of enquiry”, to “address the problem” are made, but nothing happens. In most cases, the situations actually worsen. Derisory laughter greets official promises now, laughter from all shades of the population. One sees the trend after a few years. Just examine the press clippings of yesteryear!

During 2000/1, farmers told of problems plaguing the area near the Nonoti River “but would not give their names for fear of reprisals”, according to press reports. A farmer’s wife said a gang had brazenly stolen her vegetable crops. “There was nothing we could do. Even the armed guards which made farming uneconomical, were helpless as groups just took our crops”. Farm labourers, who feared for their lives, would not come to her assistance.

Zulu chief Michael Umbogazi was reported at the time as subletting farm land (which did not belong to him) to squatters for R30 a month. This practice has worsened. In today’s KwaZulu/Natal, it is a common practice, but the price has gone up to R1 500 a plot. The national government is clearly powerless to do anything, and the provincial government even less so. The power is in the hands of the warlords. We have another Afghanistan in South Africa’s midst.

Today, invasions threaten the whole province. A similar situation to Mangete occurs in Nqabeni on the south coast of KZN where affected farmers are coloureds.(9) The local chief is allegedly involved in these invasions, and he reputedly has close links with the notorious Mathaba.

In Nonoti, an area south of the Tugela River, it has been small scale Indian market and sugar cane farmers who have been affected to the extent of having been driven off their land by invaders and, as in both Mangete and Nqabeni, there are allegations that their land has been ‘sold’ by whoever has orchestrated these actions.(10)

In the Verulam area near Durban, Indian market gardeners have been targeted by violence, the most recent example being the cold-blooded murder of a married couple in the presence of one of their children.

According to South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, there are two crucial factors which have allowed those engaged in the illegal occupation of land, including organizers, to operate with impunity: the failure of the SA Police Service to take constructive action to stop them, and the permissive response of the Department of Land Affairs towards such behaviour.(11)

Legislation is very clear that the invasion of land which is subject to a claim is illegal. Yet a blind eye is turned to Mangete and other areas in the province. There is bias towards the land claimants, and the suffering farmers are on the defensive. They are not constitutionally protected. Says Pat Dunn: “I thought we had a constitution which is supposed to protect property owners.”

There is simply no law and order. The government is not upholding the laws of the land, and the police are not protecting those who should expect protection. It will be necessary to force the state to protect constitutionally-enshrined human rights. But who’s going to pay to force the government to do its job? Therein lies the conundrum for KwaZulu/Natal farmers.

 

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Chapter VII, part 1:

Chapter VII LEVUBU, LIMPOPO PROVINCE

On September 27 2003, Levubu farmer Piet de Jager (65) was gunned down in front of his house, within earshot of his wife and two grandchildren. As he stumbled towards his front door, wounded and trying to warn his wife, she managed to lock the doors and press the panic button. His is not the first farm murder in the area. While de Jager’s son tried to revive his father with mouth to mouth resuscitation, the police stood around asking him for a statement. He suggested to them they close off farm roads to catch the killers, but they simply walked away.

This is the finest farmland in the world. We heard this phrase more than once as we moved about Levubu, south of the old Venda homeland in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Perhaps it is not true, but it should be true. The Soutpansberg (salt pan mountains) take their name from a powerful brine spring which surfaces on the western end of the range. Though not a large range – just over 130 kilometres from west to east – it is richly forested. Though the surrounding region receives little rain, the mountains themselves have an annual rainfall of nearly 2 000 mm in places, the best rainfall in South Africa. (The world average for good farming is 850 mm, which is the average rainfall for the commercial farms in the Levubu valley). A section of the Rozvi-Karanga people of Zimbabwe reached the area around the beginning of the 18th century, discovered its fertility and named it Venda (the pleasant place).

These people settled along the summit ridge of the range and are the ancestors of today’s Venda people. The soil was deep and plentiful and there was also a lake, the Fundudzi Lake.(1)
The area attracted European farmers, the first of which was Coenraad Buys who arrived in the region and made contact with the Venda in 1832. He was a wanderer and walked away from a campfire one night, never to be heard of again.

In 1836 Voortrekker leader Louis Trichardt set up his large family and cattle compound in the area, and in 1847 another Voortrekker group led by Hendrik Potgieter established a town in the area called Zoutpansbergdorp. He was followed by another Boer leader Stephanus Schoeman in 1852, who named the town Schoemansdal. In 1867 it was largely destroyed by the Venda chief Makhado. It was not until 1898 that the old Transvaal government established authority again, but the Venda people are still located in the highlands on the eastern side of the Soutpansberg.

This killing sent a shock wave through the community. In 2003, seven farmers in the area were murdered, while crime increased 400% in one year.

Years and years of peaceful relationships between white and black in the area have been sullied by the new government’s land policy. During a DLA meeting that I attended where I represented some 127 title owners whose farms were claimed, government officials made statements in the presence of many local residents (owners and claimants) that whites stole the land from blacks now claiming, and therefore basically whites had no rights in the first place.
As it is now, up to 10% of the annual production of macadamia nuts, bananas, pecans, guavas, litchis, papayas and citrus is stolen. “They just arrive in empty bakkies, fill them up with bananas, pineapples or macadamias, and drive off”, declared Reverend Kriel.(5) More than 300 complaints have been laid with the police over the past three years , says Herman de Jager, Piet de Jager’s son. They have fallen on deaf ears.(6) In many cases, the telephone at the police station goes unanswered. More than half of the 80 or so policemen at the station only speak Venda.

Due to the farming practices in South Africa’s traditional areas – gross over-grazing and over-occupation, poor land management such as slash-and-burn land-clearing – South Africa’s agricultural soil has suffered a great deal of physical degradation over the past thirty years.
Massive soil erosion now affects at least 6,1 million ha of cultivated soil in the once fertile valleys of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu/Natal regions, for instance.

Such is the history of South Africa, the waxing and waning of power between groups. In 2002, the town of Louis Trichardt was renamed Makhado by the present South African government.
The roller-coaster political history of this beautiful part of South Africa does not alter the fact that white commercial farmers have created one of the world’s most productive agricultural gems. The first white farmer settled in the Levubu Valley in 1871.

Under a newly-created government irrigation scheme, commercial farmers were invited to settle in the valley in the 1930s, and approximately 250 commercial farmers now farm there: their properties are conservatively estimated to be worth around R700 million because of the high level of crop output. This is the hub of South Africa’s sub-tropical production which includes bananas, avocados, citrus, guavas, litchis, papayas and macadamia nuts. The macadamia and avocado crops alone earn at least R200 million per year, while the total crop is worth R500 million a year.

State-of-the-art irrigation systems pump water from the Levubu and Lotonyanda Rivers, and water is also supplied by canals from the Albasini Dam and the two rivers. This area and the nearby Letsitele valley are the two highest agricultural money earners in Limpopo province.

NOW, a Venda-born agriculturalist told us some of the projects were privatized, some are being run by white agricultural consultants on yearly contracts, but most of them are no more. Rice, coffee and jojoba beans are no longer grown. A date plantation is moribund, as is a black pepper project. AgriVen’s showpiece Barotta Fruit Farm is now being run by consultants, and is under a land claim. It had all but collapsed. The recovery of macadamia nuts delivered to one of the three processing plants was 10% compared to the average of 22% from commercial farmers. Seven years of mismanagement under the new government precipitated the invitation to the consultants. They do not deny or confirm that irrigation pipes for banana plantations on the farm had not been backwashed since 1997. Down the road the multi-million rand Tshakhuma Store where AgriVen produce used to be stored before delivery to the market stands empty. Houses have been built on the ground and it is now a squatter camp. The Tsianda Fruit Farm is now not making any money. We traveled through the property - it is a beautiful farm, with good dams and a strong river running through it. But its sheds are empty and broken, and there is no farming activity. Tractors need repairing. It is a caretaker-run operation.

The bottom line, according to Venda agriculturalist Nelson Radzilani - who used to work with AgriVen and now works for the present government - is that the current administration cut the AgriVen budgets and retrenched the experienced employees. .

In contrast to the moribund condition now existing in AgriVen’s aftermath, the area’s commercial farmers flourish in one of the world’s most productive valleys, South Africa’s own Garden of Eden. R250 million worth of foreign exchange is earned every year from the Levubu Valley’s agricultural production, and the area employs 10 000 workers. With five dependants each, more than 50 000 people rely upon the sustainability of the valley. But land claims have targeted 50 000 hectares of this productive farmland, and the insecurity, racial tension and lawlessness which has occurred since these claims were gazetted has added an ominous dimension to the future of the valley.

On September 27 2003, Levubu farmer Piet de Jager (65) was gunned down in front of his house, within earshot of his wife and two grandchildren. As he stumbled towards his front door, wounded and trying to warn his wife, she managed to lock the doors and press the panic button. His is not the first farm murder in the area. While de Jager’s son tried to revive his father with mouth to mouth resuscitation, the police stood around asking him for a statement. He suggested to them they close off farm roads to catch the killers, but they simply walked away.

This killing sent a shock wave through the community. In 2003, seven farmers in the area were murdered, while crime increased 400% in one year.

The de Jager killing only exacerbated the tension which has built up over the government’s land reform policy, and the announcement that government land expropriations are on their way. Years and years of peaceful relationships between white and black in the area have been sullied by the new (Mandela's African National Congress) government’s land policy.

The end of Levubu will be the end of subtropical agricultural farming in South Africa”

 

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Chapter VII, part 2:

As it is now, up to 10% of the annual production of macadamia nuts, bananas, pecans, guavas, litchis, papayas and citrus is stolen. “They just arrive in empty bakkies, fill them up with bananas, pineapples or macadamias, and drive off”, More than 300 complaints have been laid with the police over the past three years , says Herman de Jager, Piet de Jager’s son. They have fallen on deaf ears.(6) In many cases, the telephone at the police station goes unanswered. More than half of the 80 or so policemen at the station only speak Venda.

“Venda is being stolen blind” says Dr. Henry Numdzivhadi, a Venda historian.(7) He says it is not only the commercial farmers who are plundered. Venda farmers are also fed up and frustrated. An old Venda lady selling food at the side of the road was killed with a stone for R15, recounts Dr. Numdzivhadi. “Nobody knows if her murderers have been brought to justice”. He also complains bitterly about the police who do not follow up on complaints.

Numdzivhadi declared that the “previously strong government structures have disintegrated, resulting in a breakdown in discipline”. One farmer who retired to Levubu says the agricultural ground is valuable in monetary terms, but in reality it is worthless. The land claims Sword of Damocles has rendered it so.

The situation in Levubu is no different than in other areas of South Africa – poor policing, stock and crop theft, personal intimidation, threats to take land. At one meeting between Levubu land claimants and farmers, the latter were told by a claimant that they should just hand over their title deeds to the claimants “and then you can work for us”. Indeed, this seems to be the new trend in claimants’ thinking, most of whom don’t want to farm and cannot farm commercially.

One must compare AgriVen’s ambitious development and results with what happened when the new South African government took over, incorporated the area into mainstream South Africa, retrenched the experienced AgriVen staff and crimped the budget. Instead of maintaining and building upon something that was already there, they allowed it to crumble and decay. So what are Levubu farmers to think when they look at government land reform policy? And what must South Africa’s taxpayers think when they see the wastage and the decay and the results of land handovers in the rest of South Africa?

Some productive farms in parts of Mpumalanga or North West Province are worth at most R1 500 a ha, but they are nonetheless productive and provide a fair living for their owners who nurture them 24 hours a day. So much more damage is done to South Africa when land worth R100 000 per ha is turned over to people who cannot farm, where no impact study has been completed, and where operating capital soon runs out. Is Levubu to become yet another South African squatter camp?

Despite the assurances from the Department of Land Affairs that this will not happen in Levubu, it has happened all around South Africa. Examples can be quoted where the handing over ceremonies were replete with guarantees that the recipients would cherish what they had been given for virtually nothing. Yet except where there has been outside help, or mentoring, not one instance of a successful land handover can be found in South Africa. Why should Levubu be any different?

Farming is remorseless. In the early 1970s Bertie le Roux was one of the pioneers in macadamia nut farming. Macadamias put Levubu on the map. South Africa is now the third largest macadamia producer in the world, after Australia and Hawaii.(11)

“Our success is due to hard work, diligence, discipline and a lot of planning and risk taking. When we started with macadamias, many mistakes were made because we had no knowledge of the product or the market”, declares le Roux. These farms are really smallholdings – around 40ha to 50ha. But when each hectare can produce a gross income of between R35 000 and R70 000 a year with bananas or macadamias, then the value of the land is obvious.

Has the government the money to pay market prices for these farms? The government’s total budget for land restitution for 2002 was R701 million, so how can a small farming community occupying only around 30 000 ha lay claim to half of the total nation budget for land redistribution?

Why do the chiefs want to take the productive farms of Levubu when there is so much other good land, queries Hoffman. “We made a success of farming through hard work. Nobody gave us anything on a plate. All Venda land is tribal land. The tribal chiefs are demanding the commercial farmers’ land. The government doesn’t go to auctions to see what’s for sale. They don’t contact estate agents in the area for the same reason.” The black farmers in the area only farm cash crops. This is where their expertise ends. Hoffman says fruit trees would grow exceptionally well in the area, and the top soil is at least three meters deep.

The Tshiombo Irrigation Scheme was well planned, says Hoffman. But already some irrigation pipes and sluices have been broken. Irrigation thus cannot function properly, even though it is gravity irrigation. Residents in nearby houses must carry water themselves from the canals because they have not installed pipes to their homes. Like farmers throughout South Africa, Hoffman and his compatriots are quite prepared to help emerging farmers succeed on their own land. He cannot agree however with the taking of already productive farms and giving it to people who, from what they see around them, cannot farm in the sophisticated manner needed to produce the export crops now grown in the area.

A report released in December 2001 by the Department of Land Affairs states that 45% of all land in Limpopo belongs to the State.(13) This constitutes a total of well over 5 million hectares. Very little of this land has been transferred to developing farmers. Yet (the ANC) government is very silent on this aspect.

Due to the farming practices in South Africa’s traditional areas – gross over-grazing and over-occupation, poor land management such as slash-and-burn land-clearing – South Africa’s agricultural soil has suffered a great deal of physical degradation over the past thirty years.
Massive soil erosion now affects at least 6,1 million ha of cultivated soil in the once fertile valleys of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu/Natal regions, for instance.

The Claimants

Bertie le Roux (72) arrived in Levubu with his parents in 1940, at the age of nine. Malaria was rife in the area, and there were hardly any roads. Le Roux says there were very few black people there at the time. They lived up in the mountains to keep away from the malaria in the valley, he said. “We had to get labourers from the Kruger National Park area, most of them Malawians and Mozambicans.” (14)

The land claims chart shown to our researchers indicates that a total number of 33 tribes or groups are claiming 15 farms, including Bertie le Roux’s. Some of the claims overlap.
Anthropologists were instructed by a number of affected landowners to investigate the veracity of the Ravele claim. During the investigations, a letter dated 21 October 1996 was uncovered from a Department of Land Affairs ethnology consultant discussing the Ravele tribe’s land claim on certain farms. The Ravele tribe is one of the 33 land claimants in the area.

The history of the Ravele people (of Venda stock) has not been recorded in any detail, says the consultant’s letter. As is the case of the Letsitele removals, some of the Ravele people were removed for environmental purposes in 1938. The Raveles were resettled on irrigation and dry land allotments. “They therefore were not the victims of the 1936 land act but greatly benefited from the application of its provisions”. In any event, title deeds show that large tracts of Levubu land was privately owned by whites as early as 1871. The Raveles declare in their land claim application that “they have lost their self-determination”. They however overlook the fact “that the measure of self-determination which they enjoyed before the war of 1898 (the Mphephu war) was restored to them in 1938 when they were resettled in terms of the 1936 Land Act.”

The Department of Land Affairs financially supports some of these so-called independent organizations, because “land for the landless” is a very attractive clarion cry to gain political support.

Venda communal land is high potential farmland. There is access to perennial streams and the annual rainfall is higher than in Levubu’s commercial farming sector. Surely the government should utilize this land for emerging farmers, and leave alone those who successfully produce food for the whole of South Africa.

 

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Chapter VIII:

Chapter VIII Eastern Transvaal
MPUMALANGA PROVINCE

One particular land claim caught the attention of the world – the farm Boomplaats belonging to Mr. Willem Pretorius. This farmer refused to accept the price offered by the government and lengthy legal manoeuvering ensued.

On 17 March 2001 the London Daily Telegraph said that “a white farmer became the first to have his land expropriated by the South African government yesterday as part of its attempt to return land stolen from black communities under the apartheid regime.” “Amid a climate of death threats and intimidation against other white farmers, Willem Pretorius, 50, likened the seizure of his 3 100 acre property in Mpumalanga to the farm invasions in neighbouring Zimbabwe”. The article continued: “there is still vast land ownership inequality in South Africa with 80% of top quality agricultural land owned by whites, who make up only 13% of the population”. (Naturally there’s not a word about who turned the fallow, uncultivated soil into the “top quality” land it is today!). Overseas television networks joined in the fray.

Mr. Pretorius’ neighbour who occupied the other half of the large farm, agreed to accept compensation after receiving death threats and suffering acts of vandalism. This 80-year-old farmer accepted a lower-than-market price – he said it was 50% under-valued – just to get out. His property was to be occupied by the new owners numbering 600 families, and he handed over the keys to his farm in April 2001. Mr. Pretorius held out. He said he bought his farm from the state more than 20 years ago when it was “a piece of veld”, and that he had built the farm up from nothing.

After the world media publicity about those who had been forcibly removed, and the stealing of land by whites, what eventually transpired at Boomplaats? Presently no farming takes place at Boomplaats.

One of the more scandalous examples of skewed land reform was the transfer of a 2 750 ha pig farm for which the government paid R5 million some years ago. This property consisted of one of the country’s most modern piggeries where 2 400 pigs were sustained by state-of-the-art feeding equipment. The farm was highly profitable, with ample water, fertile ground and modern sheep and cattle feeding pens. Former president Nelson Mandela arrived in a helicopter to preside over the handover ceremonies. He said the farm would be “the bread basket of the community”. The farm was handed over to the stewardship of a tribal chief.

Within a short time, the farm was in total disarray. Squatters from the neighbouring township (where the same chief was something of a warlord) moved in and their cattle grazed at will. The sheep and cattle pens fell into disrepair, while the remaining 500 pigs were in such a state of starvation they had begun to eat each other. (Italics ours). A local farmer was called in and he bought the pigs on the spot. The chief pocketed the cash. In November 2001 I wrote to the Minister of Land Affairs about this and other failures of land reform. I received an acknowledgement of my letter but no indication was given that my complaints and reports would be acted upon.

Given the present state of this farm, the minister did not act upon my information. The people on the farm currently owe R2 million to the Land Bank, we are told and, as with so many other similar cases, nothing much is happening on this farm. It is more or less a squatter camp, says the previous owner who looks in on the mess occasionally.

A very smart press release was issued by Mr. Rob Sneddon of the H L Hall & Sons group in Nelspruit in June, 2003. His company transferred 6 000ha of productive land to 1 100 members of the Mdluli clan on a lease-back deal. Also included in this deal were 4 100 legal occupiers of the company’s properties in Mpumalanga. These “legal occupiers” are in fact employees, and this latter group have become owners of their employer’s property courtesy of the South African taxpayer.

They cannot be classified as restitution claimants within the legal parameters of the land reform legislation, and it is a question why the Department of Land Affairs could find R63 million for this transaction involving employees of a company when they do not have money for the 27 genuine land claimants mentioned in the Blaauwpoort farm deal above. While the Mdluli clan (and the workers) have title to the land, they will be paid a certain figure per year for the period of the lease (which is not mentioned in the press release). Given that there are still 5 000 land claims to be settled in Mpumalanga, Chris Williams director of the Rural Action Committee says this is a “huge settlement” which will set a precedent others cannot follow.

Indeed! This must be one of the most expensive land claims in South Africa. We telephoned Mr. Sneddon and asked what else the recipients received for the R63 million other than their lease rental payments from Hall & Sons each year and title to the land which they have now leased? The deal is certainly win-win, as Mr. Sneddon says – win-win for him but hardly win-win for the taxpayers who have forked out a large amount to satisfy 4 200 of Mr. Sneddon’s employees who by no stretch of the imagination can be classified as land claimants. After some testy replies, Mr. Sneddon told our researcher she was “getting up his nose”. But as taxpayers, we have every right to know the ins and outs of this deal which, as we said, is one of the most costly land claims transactions since the land reform program came into being.

One of the biggest scandals to come out of this province is the wholesale destruction of game and livestock through poaching and its corollary, snaring. Mr. Peter Spears farms near Hectorspruit – he is midway between the Kangwane homeland and a municipal squatter camp, between the devil and the deep blue sea! In South African farming, this is the worst position in which you can find yourself, and Mr. Spears’ recounting of what happens to his animals is a terrible story.
In two years he has recovered 4 000 snares. He and the other farmers in the area must watch helplessly as their animals are destroyed, many left to die in the bush. He says many of the squatter camp residents are illegals from across the border and elsewhere in Africa. Township gangs organise the farm poaching, and he knows who they are. One gang boss has six or seven men working for him full time. Spears pays a fortune to bring in security personnel from as far away as Hoedspruit because local security personnel are intimidated and threatened with death if they do their jobs.

What he finds astonishing is that he has to fill in forms and obtain permits and go through the realms of bureaucracy in order to run his farm and buy animals and transfer them, but the criminal township gangs roam untrammeled by even the basics of any control system. His security people picked up one man recently with 40 snares in his possession. These poachers chase the game into one area of his farm and the game become sitting ducks for the meat thieves. (Another farmer nearby who shall be nameless for fear of retribution told us the police are “hopeless” and that he sees them using police vehicles to load up liquor for the shebeens they own and/or run. They also use these vehicles to pick up people on the road and charge them for the ride. “I have seen this with my own eyes”, he said.)

Mr. Spears says as a child they used to sleep in a tent on their farm property (his farm is a family farm), “but now, there is no law and order, no control, and we live like prisoners: burglar bars, alarms, electric fencing”. Now nothing is safe. In 2003 he lost 20 head of cattle and 400 impalas to poachers alone. Foreign visitors know what’s going on, he says, and South Africa’s shameful lack of law and order is no longer a secret. Two poachers were recently caught “and they are still inside” declares Mr. Spears hopefully. “Some who do get caught are charged for minor offences and released without bail, and this doesn’t deter them from doing it again”. His black neighbours who farm on a land claim restitution property thrash anyone caught poaching to within an inch of his life. They have less trouble than Mr. Spears who, like so many whites, will be hauled over the coals if he so much as touches a miscreant. “We are fair game”, he says.

Every two weeks Mr. Spears sends 100 workers into the bush to clear it of snares.
We asked him about the game farms near the Kruger Park. “They are all suffering. There is no control. The Kruger Park is crawling with poachers.

The Parks Board should do more. I don’t want to say this but I believe there will be no Kruger Park in ten years. That’s my assessment”. On that note we left Mr. Spears, yet another victim of the lawlessness now endemic in South Africa.

Other land claims handovers are being run by mentors and managers while the new owners simply take a percentage of the profits or a lease figure. This type of “restitution” actually creates a “dole class” of South Africans – people who live on the work of others, while the government pretends that their land reform program is “building up a class of black commercial farmers”.

 

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Chapter IX, part 1:

Chapter IX THE LIMPOPO PROVINCE

“On the road that leaves Pretoria on its way north to Kipling’s ‘great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River’, to the land of baobab trees, to Zimbabwe and the enigmatic heart of central Africa, the traveler is confronted by an extraordinary scene – a vast plain, covered in thorn trees, with deep, reddish soil and only the merest hint of a mountain 100 kilometres away on the northern horizon”- “The Vanishing Landscape” from the “Reader’s Digest Guide to Southern Africa”, published by Reader’s Digest Association. South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Cape Town.

Two years ago, South Africa was shocked to learn about the spectacular citrus and semi-tropical fruit farm failures in Limpopo province.

From 1918 to 1926, more than 565 000 citrus trees were planted on 2 260 ha of this estate’s land. For the twenty five years before the estate was sold to the South African government in 1974, it showed a profit of millions of rands every year. After the sale, Zebediela grew to become “the diamond of agricultural projects”. It was of such great national pride that the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Southern Africa wrote in 1978 that “nearly 400 million oranges are harvested each year from the groves of Zebediela, the world’s biggest citrus estate. The output is sufficient to provide one orange for every eight people on earth.

In 1974, the South African government bought the Zebediela Estate.” After the ANC government came to power in 1994, the administration of Zebediela came under the control of the newly-formed Agricultural and Rural Development Corporation (ARDC), a government parastatal whose administration eventually ruined not only Zebediela but scores of other agricultural projects in the area. Before this takeover, Zebediela’s harvest was worth R30 million a year.

It didn’t take long for the corruption, theft and maladministration to set in. By 2001, the estate was in ruins. The original 2 260 hectares planted had been reduced to 800 hectares. Because no fertilizers and pesticides were used, more than half the trees died as a result of the Department of Agriculture’s failure to grant funds for the survival of the project. Only ten per cent of yields could be marketed.

Hundreds of thousands of cartons of oranges and lemons were not harvested, and workers were not paid. A lemon yield worth R8 million was left to rot because there was no money to pay staff. The fruit was in any event of inferior quality because it had not been properly looked after. Many of the fleet of 50 tractors collapsed into disrepair. Hundreds of employees were then retrenched.

Managers with in some cases forty years experience were replaced with people who had no experience of farming. One new “manager” was previously a sewing instructor while another was until the previous year a student. The press was informed that not one of the new directors appointed to the Zebediela and its sister Lisbon estate could read a financial statement.(2)

The death throes of the estate peaked at the end of March 2001 when ABSA bank stopped all credit and bounced a pension cheque of R56 million. Other estates in the area met with the same fate.

The Lisbon Citrus and Mango Estate, the largest producer of mangoes in Africa, was liquidated. While there was no money for pesticides and fertilizers to save thousands of mango trees, a consultant appointed by the province to conduct a “viability study” was paid R300 000, and then told everybody what they already knew.

Of the 77 community garden projects established by the ARDC, 15 had been abandoned by the year 2000 because there was insufficient water. Inadequate feasibility studies were performed regarding the availability of water resources for these garden projects.(7) As in the case with the Venda homeland projects, schemes introduced before the new government came to power in 1994 were crippled after their takeover because of the cribbing of budgets. Where incomes had been generated from coffee, citrus, mango and banana farms, new budget cuts prevented maintenance and repairs on equipment. By the year 2000, only 20% of the tractor fleet was still running, while irrigation equipment was in a poor state. Disease spraying programs had been severely cut, and weed control was minimal.

From what we garnered from people who were intimately involved in the management of Zebediela, the following facts became apparent. As in most things in life, all is not what it seems! Until 1980, the citrus trees at Zebediela were regularly replaced. During that period, Zebediela exported three million cartons of oranges per annum. As we mentioned, there were originally approximately 600 000 trees in production. Now, less than 200 000 trees are in production. The rest died, and were cut up for firewood.

Further, the original area under plantation was 2260 ha. Now less than 800 ha are under production. So the estate is being run at a third of its total potential. This season, 300 000 cartons were exported, exactly 10% of the estate’s original export quota.

The company managing the estate can hardly be expected to re-capitalize the plantation. If equipment breaks down, we are told that it is cannibalized from other estates which are moribund. Although the Boyes group put R28 million into the business, the production costs per annum are higher than this figure. The electrical distribution system is in a “state of collapse” according to someone who knows the estate. The inspectors don’t want to even go into the sub-stations because it is dangerous. There is no investment in the maintenance of the irrigation distribution system.

Water utilization is poor. Zebediela’s lifeline is water, and it is essential that proper irrigation be practiced. During the last five years the dams filled up twice. There is good catchment water.

Prior to 1974, the trees were watered with flood irrigation. Now drip irrigation is used. When the original 2260 ha were under production, the water lasted three years with flood irrigation. Now with less than 800 ha in production, the dams are emptied in one year. Thus, the use of water is not optimal, and in a country like South Africa, this is crucial.

 

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Chapter IX, part 2:

Other Land Transfers

The 3000 ha farm “La Boheme” near Tzaneen was handed over to land claimants in 1996/7. It was a thriving mango and citrus farm. It is now a squatter camp. The Inyaka/Waterval/Zoeknog coffee estates were started from scratch in the old Lebowa homeland. These three projects occupied approximately 1 000 ha. More than R6 million was put into the projects at the time and the estates’ turnover was R3,2 million a year, with a profit margin of 20%.

Extensive plans were made to expand these projects as they had not reached their full potential. However, the new 1994 (Mqndela's African National Congress) administration gradually crimped the budget. There was no development capital available, and eventually no money for electricity and the telephone. The efficient management structure was replaced by the new administration’s political appointees. Nothing was planted and the development plans came to a halt. Today these former coffee plantations have been invaded by squatters and their cattle. The fields were burnt out three times. Everything has been stripped – the whole pump station – its roof, the pump, the electrical cable motors: everything that could be stolen has been stolen.

R11 million was paid for this 3 600 ha Oerlemans brothers property which was given to the Makotopong Community at a handing over ceremony in March 2002. Thousands were at the party, according to an observer. In September 2002, the Oerlemans brothers harvested their last crop of tobacco, onions and some fruit. Since then, theft has been chronic. Equipment broke down and was not repaired.
The new owners did not plant. There were no crops to harvest because the grapes and peaches were dying. The turnover of this farm under the Oerlemans was between R2,5 to R4 million per annum, depending on the crops and the weather. They paid taxes of more than R200 000 per year. They employed 120 workers, 80 of whom are now unemployed. (The Oerlemans took forty of their workers to their new, small farm). Today there is no farming on Roodevaal. Four or five people are reputed to be there but the vast bulk of the 200 and more claimants don’t want to move to the farm because there are no prospects for them there.

We endeavoured to assess the true position of these estates. From what we garnered from people who were intimately involved in the management of Zebediela, the following facts became apparent. As in most things in life, all is not what it seems! Until 1980, the citrus trees at Zebediela were regularly replaced. During that period, Zebediela exported three million cartons of oranges per annum. As we mentioned, there were originally approximately 600 000 trees in production. Now, less than 200 000 trees are in production. The rest died, and were cut up for firewood.

Further, the original area under plantation was 2260 ha. Now less than 800 ha are under production. So the estate is being run at a third of its total potential. This season, 300 000 cartons were exported, exactly 10% of the estate’s original export quota.

Some private farmers today are producing up to 3 000 export cartons per hectare. Zebediela is now producing only 375 export cartons per hectare. There has been no replanting since 1987. There are today 350 permanent workers and, in season, another 600 are taken on. Before Zebediela collapsed, 1 200 permanent labourers were on the payroll, with a further 900 taken on in the season. As it is now, the government is paying the permanent workers, while before, the estate carried this cost.

Water utilization is poor. Zebediela’s lifeline is water, and it is essential that proper irrigation be practiced. During the last five years the dams filled up twice. There is good catchment water.

Prior to 1974, the trees were watered with flood irrigation. Now drip irrigation is used. When the original 2260 ha were under production, the water lasted three years with flood irrigation. Now with less than 800 ha in production, the dams are emptied in one year. Thus, the use of water is not optimal, and in a country like South Africa, this is crucial.

(There are many more examples in chapter IX, all of which are the same, from prosperity to ruin in one easy step, here is another

In May 2001, the Sowetan ran a piece entitled “Land redistribution ‘will bring success.’” (14) In this article, Limpopo MEC for Agriculture Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi’s tone was somewhat different to that reflected in the mainstream press. The good doctor said that “a culture of dependency had developed in the former homelands of Lebowa, Venda and Gazankulu that had destroyed the people’s will to achieve success and prosperity”. Motsoaledi affirmed that it was the government’s most important strategy “to change the mindset of people who had been welfare beneficiaries and to instill a sense of independence and ownership”.

At present, there are two or three people on the farm, according to local observers. They survive by fishing and grazing their cattle, sometimes on neighboring farms because their fencing is broken. It would appear Dr. Motsoaledi has not come back to see what happened to the people who’s “will had been destroyed because of their dependency on former homeland developments”. A comment would not go amiss here. This is a perfect example of how the public is misled by grandiose statements at handing-over ceremonies, suitably reported on and sometimes embellished by the press. In fact, the results of the outlay of taxpayers’ money are kept hidden, never mind the loss of production and the loss of taxation to the country’s fiscus. This and hundreds (thousands) of other cases throughout the country are examples of criminal neglect by the government and provincial authorities who should be monitoring what happens to taxpayers’ money and to the hapless people who are left to “farm” virtually on their own.

Agriculture is of vital importance to employment in the province. According to the October 2001 census, agriculture was responsible for the employment of 10% of the working population throughout South Africa, but reached a high of 17,8% in Limpopo. This is exceptionally important when it is remembered that 34% of the population of 20 years or more has had no schooling.

The destruction of some of the world’s best citrus estates has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many, especially those who were intimately involved in the development and successful running of these estates.

 

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Chapter X:

Chapter X THE WESTERN CAPE

This cape is a most stately thing, and the fairest Cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth. - Sir Francis Drake, English seaman. (1540 – 1596)

Organised agriculture is extremely worried: it warns that an alarming 75% to 80% of all the government’s land reform agricultural projects for small holders end up as failures.

The Western Cape has experienced a number of serious setbacks which have exacerbated the position of agriculture in the region – the repercussions of the fruit farm liquidations over the past two years are still being felt.

At the Agri Wes-Kaap congress in September 2003, Mr. Pieter Strauss, deputy chairman of the Agri Klein-Karoo cooperative at Oudtshoorn referred to a report commissioned by Agri Klein-Karoo on the situation surrounding a government initiative called the Toekomsrust Smallholders Trust. Formed in 2001 with 47 members, each of whom received R20 000 as a government grant, the 30 ha Karoo farm Groenfontein, with 18 ha of fertile agricultural land, was purchased and carved up into 47 smallholdings.

Few of the farmers knew each other, and had no experience of operating such a cooperative venture. They had no individual title to their pieces of land, and their lack of responsibility soon created splits in this community. They had no knowledge of any kind of financial management or budgeting, no knowledge of managing farms and its manpower needs. None of them could add up costs or do calculations. Further, they were not pre-selected for their farming ability, or even their desire to farm. Of course the project failed. It was set up to fail. Of the 47, only 17 wanted to farm, while the others – with no incentive to succeed because they received everything for nothing – didn’t pull their weight.

The state brought in consultants who conceived three business plans at R100 000 each. Local farmers say the consultants came from up country and knew little about local conditions. One consultant’s report, for example, showed that he knew nothing about access to viable water supplies and other resources. Another business plan drawn up by the Land Bank did not contain medium- to long-term projections nor environmental sensitivity studies – only short-term projections.

Local farmers were prepared to do a business plan for the project free of charge, but the offer wasn’t taken up. Today, the farm, Groenfontein, is inoperative and the trust shareholders have disappeared. The report on this failure concluded that the government should not use land in its attempts to alleviate the problems of joblessness, food insecurity and poverty. Carving up valuable agricultural land should never be seen as a long-term solution for re-housing the poor. ANC politicians should stop issuing public, self-serving promises such as “within two years 7 000 new farmers can be settled in the Western Cape”. These statements create false expectations, says the report, and the land reform process will descend (HAS DESCENDED) into utter chaos.

The government must stop appointing inexperienced city “consultants” (read idiologically indoctrinated ) without any agricultural knowledge or local conditions. The report recommends that the government appoint experienced agriculturalists from the regions in question. They have the hands-on knowledge and are willing to help, concluded the repo

The 23 hectare property Thembulethu near George was a highly-productive, intensively planted vegetable farm using tunnel cultivation. Seven years ago it was purchased for R8 million and handed over to 15 recipients who then carved up smallholdings of 2.1/2 hectares each. The property had excellent soil and good ground water. After five years, things started to go wrong and the Department of Land Affairs refused to provide more funding for the operation. It is now inactive and the smallholders have left.

In August 2002, The Sunday Times reported that the people who had received Elandskloof six years ago under a land claim transfer were “battling to prosper”.(3) In a rare instance of good journalistic follow up, the Times reporter highlighted the “hope and pain” of Aletta Titus “who is grumpy today. She may be standing on the very spot where she grew up, a beneficiary of South Africa’s first successful land claim, surrounded by lands that can easily earn R2 million profit from citrus a year – but six years after the claim was settled, she still does not have a proper house to call her own and the valley is severely underdeveloped”.

The farm Elandskloof is situated in the beautiful Elandskloof valley of the Cedarberg mountains, two hours north of Cape Town. Commented the Times: “Despite a six-year process that has seen more than 332 000 ha of land handed over at a purchase price of R377 million – often with the assistance of neighbouring white farmers – land restitution has often been dogged by community in-fighting, state uncertainty, red tape and a critical lack of skills”.

A local attorney involved in black empowerment initiatives said at the time that “empowerment farms need a visionary mentor – someone with exceptional people skills, knowledge and drive. Preferably the consultant should be directly involved with the business for a good few years”.(10) Translated, this means someone to run the operation on a day to day basis, as commercial farm owners do.

Fast forward to June 2003. Northridge is placed under provisional liquidation. Paul Onrust, chairman of the Northbridge Community Board said there had been “internal problems with the management of the farm”. Local ABSA bank risk manager Pieter de Beer said he was aware that a forensic audit had been called for by external consultants. Four months later, the liquidators are still trying to sort out the mess. (11) Meanwhile, 150 people are looking for jobs as only three of the original 153 employees have been kept on to help the auditors.

The story of these failed farms is beginning to sound like a scratched and annoying ancient record. As with so many other failed projects, a combination of poor management, ludicrous expectations and the Department of Land Affairs’ lack of serious follow up has resulted in an expensive failure for the taxpayers, loss of agricultural production and export currency, loss of taxation to the South African fiscus and a ruined farm which may never be resuscitated.

The government has admitted that it did not monitor the project properly. “The largest mistake in this project was to assume that the project was doing well, based on what the beneficiaries and a consultant maintained”, the Department of Land Affairs told Noseweek.(13) All of these people, of course, had a vested interest in keeping the project alive, because they were being handsomely remunerated from it. The role of expensive consultants comes into question, and is a matter of great concern to organized agriculture. Some comments made to our researchers about these city slickers are unprintable.

Millions have been poured into agricultural training in the Western Cape. In September 2002, it was announced that the “ANC/NNP coalition government in the Western Cape” is to start training more than 7 000 people from disadvantaged backgrounds as farmers over the next few years”.

Perhaps political parties should (instead) concentrate on (ending) irresponsible land reform, as a starter.

 

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Chapter XI, part 1:

Chapter XI THE NORTHERN CAPE

And the springboks bounced, and fluttered, and flew, Hooping their spines on the gaunt Karoo.

- From “The Flaming Terrapin” by Roy Campbell, South African poet (1901-1957)

The Khomani San people of the Northern Cape are stumbling under the complexities of owning thousands of hectares of land they cannot manage. Their current travails are about land they received under a claim they made for six farms totaling 36 000 ha in 1999 near the Kgalagadi National Park in the Northern Cape. In addition to this, they were given another 25 000 ha of the park itself in 2002. During the handing over ceremony, Minister of Land Affairs Ms. Thoko Didiza hailed the second handover of land to the Khomani San people as an example of how a community “can claim its heritage”.

What makes these remarks so astonishing is that the six farms originally given to the San people were already on the ropes at the time Minister Didiza made her remarks committing a further 25 000 ha to them. According to a February 2002 press report(2), the first property was already on its last legs. It had been handed over in a blaze of publicity on Human Rights Day, March 21, 1999 by President Thabo Mbeki. Just two years later, the farm infrastructure had collapsed, the community had no motorized transport and virtually no livestock, most of the game had been either sold or poached, the remaining game was dying of thirst because the water pumps were broken, leading community members were occupying houses earmarked for tourism initiatives, and the community had split.(3) Seventy five percent of the farms’ infrastructure had disappeared.

Each family gets a litre of water a day because water and electricity to the farms were cut off in September 2002, at the same time Minister Didiza was handing the community another 25 000 hectares.

This of course begs the question – why hand over 61 000 ha of land when it is almost a foregone conclusion that the recipients will fail? Surely the Khomani San deserve better than that? And surely the taxpayers should also expect a better deal! A development consultant said in June 2003 that there were only 12 gemsbok and 60 springbok left on one farm which once held game worth millions of rand.(9) What leaves a bitter taste is the press coverage surrounding most of these handovers. Indeed, it is the glowing newspaper articles and the TV clips which alerted us in the first place to investigate these changes of ownership. Without exception, the handovers are treated as joyous affairs, with the San bushmen “getting their land at last”

This is evidenced by the handing over of a second group of farms at the very moment the water and electricity supply was being cut to the first farms they received!

We were informed on good authority that close to one million hectares of land has been transferred in the Northern Cape area. “Only a few projects can be described as successful”, said a dispirited member of organized agriculture who lives in the area. “We want these people to succeed, but they don’t. It’s a tragedy,” he said. He told us of the paprika project, where more than R50 million was pumped into setting up a new 550ha paprika farming scheme near Goodhouse in the baking Northern Cape, arguably the hottest place in South Africa. “Temperatures reach up to 50C in summer in Goodhouse, while for paprika to be grown successfully, the temperature must not be warmer than 32C”, said a farmer in the know.

This project is not a viable proposition, he declared. The market value of paprika is R7,50 per kilo. But labor costs to harvest one kilo of paprika are already R4,00. Paprika farming is very labor intensive,.......In an article published on 5 December 2003, it was reported that the multi-million rand Paprika Project almost collapsed “earlier this year”. (12) Millions of rands worth of paprika was not harvested.

Other projects upon which the committee expressed its misgivings were the Wavelength Steel Project and the Kalahari Kid goat project which had as yet not produced a profit. During a visit in November 2003, the committee found that the steel project was not even in operation.

The committee also decried the fact that the large number of overseas visits conducted by the department’s personnel had not borne fruit. “Various representative delegations went to China and have not yet informed the committee of the results of their visits.”

The advice of the consultants is often not taken, we heard, and the owners – the community – “don’t want to farm - they want the money without the hard work”, ....He added that the area never before produced paprika, and that the Department of Agriculture had conducted a study on paprika growing near Upington and had concluded it would not work there.

The origins of the land claim against the Riemvasmaak area of the Northern Cape are an interesting legal conundrum. One hundred and forty kilometers west of Upington, one of the hottest places in South Africa, live 2 400 Namas on 14 000 ha of hilly desert wilderness. These Namas were originally from the old South West Africa (now Namibia) and during the 1914 war, they fled across the South African/SWA border and were given refuge and helped to settle in the area by the Roman Catholic church.

Under the old National Party government policy, the community was returned to the then South West Africa. After the present government came to power, they claimed the land “where their forefathers were buried” and some of the community returned to Riemvasmaak in South Africa after the claim was granted. Others remained behind in Namibia.

Riemvasmaak has turned into something of a disaster. It was one of the first land restitution projects in South Africa. There is no electricity or running water for the community, and the ground is full of shale and stones. “It is not good enough to simply dump people on a piece of ground and then hope they can look after themselves”, said a farmer near Upington.

The Nama people of Richtersveld, a barren piece of land along the southern banks of the Orange River in the Northern Cape, were the beneficiaries of a recent Constitutional Court decision confirming a Supreme Court of Appeal ruling to return their land from which they were removed in the 1920s, when alluvial diamond mining commenced. The land is currently held in trust by the South African government and is leased by mining companies Alexkor and Transhex, who pay a small royalty to the Richtersveld community. This land claim was the first brought under aboriginal title rights in South Africa, and the ruling made history because, inter alia, the government sided with the mining company Alexkor and not the claimants.

Several elderly community members testified that their historic links to the land went back 200 years when the Nama occupied the land as semi-nomadic pastoralists. Their land claim was originally rejected by the Land Claims Court - the SA government and the mining company Alexkor entered a defence against the claim. The case involved the key issue of the validity of aboriginal title, and set a precedent in land claims applications in South Africa where “aboriginal” title claims are unusual. The Richtersvelders’ claim was supported by the South African Legal Resources Centre, and the amount of their legal compensation for diamond sales, if they should eventually win, would be considerable.

The government for its part did not want to lose the lucrative benefits of its ownership of Richtersveld and its minerals. The Constitutional Court’s ruling that the Richtersvelders have a right to the land they are claiming has implications for property rights in South Africa. It also reveals something else: if the Richtersvelders have “aboriginal title”, then who else is “aboriginal” in South Africa? Or is no one else “aboriginal” except the San, the Khoi and the Bushmen? This implies that everyone else living in the country is, in one way or another, a settler. While the government is prepared to dish out private farm land to claimants on the flimsiest of bases at times, they appointed rafts of expensive lawyers to fight the Richtersvelders tooth and nail – because diamonds are clearly Ms Thoko Didiza’s best friend!

 

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Chapter XI, part 2:

The Goats Milk Project

Four years ago, this project was set up near Victoria West at a cost of around R2 million. The plan was to make cheese from free-range goats belonging to local residents, and the dairy production company Simonsberg was called in to provide training for the project. Cheese-making equipment was provided and forage was purchased for the goats. However, some participants forgot to bring their goats in at the weekend, and many of the animals were mishandled. They were badly penned, and in the end, the SPCA was brought in to remove the last two remaining goats which were in a parlous state. Naturally this cooperative venture to assist fifty people collapsed, and in 2003 the equipment was sold under auction. ( I ask, is there one marxist inspired project that has ever worked anywhere in the world??)

Bucklands

In June 2003, “after almost ten years of struggle” (14), the Griqua people of Bucklands near Kimberley received nine farms under South Africa’s land redistribution policy. This prime land is on a spot at the confluence of the Vaal and Orange Rivers. “The 13 000 ha have great development potential for irrigated agriculture. It is virgin soil and is reputed to be some of the highest yielding farmland in the country”.(15)

Most of the land is covered with thorn trees and shrubs, but there are reputed to be many diamond deposits on the farms. A further 12 farms valued at R41 million by the Department of Land Affairs in 2001, are due to be handed over under the same claim. There is however resistance from some of the present owners because the farms carry expensive agricultural structures and contain diamond deposits. Further, and perhaps more importantly, two owners dispute the validity of the claims. Schalk Human is one of the farmers challenging the claim against his property. He said he didn’t even know there was a claim on his land until the local claims commissioner came to his farm. Louis Wilken also contests the claim. The land has been under white ownership since 1876, both farmers say, and the restitution law commences from 1913 and onwards. Human and Wilken say the local land claims commissioner warned them that if they resisted the commission’s ruling, they might be taken to court and their land could be expropriated. (16)

A report in July 2003, just one month after the handover, tells of a split in the community of 3 500.(17) They want to obtain mining permits before giving access to their land. At the other end of the spectrum, mining companies both in South Africa and overseas are dealing directly with the government to try and obtain permits to mine the land.

So far, the Bucklands people have not received their permit. They cannot fill in the application forms, and they say no one in the government will help them. In desperation, the community has turned to lawyers to exert pressure on the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs to help them. But the department says it doesn’t know what the community is talking about.

Two land claims in the Northern Cape involve considerable diamond deposits. The small Tswana community headed by brothers Abel and Joseph Pholoholo are angry because the claim they lodged in 1995 has been gazetted, but they say they sit on the sidelines and watch diamonds being taken out of their ground, and can do nothing.(21) The ground belongs to a British company and they have lodged their rejection of the claim. Abel Pholoholo says there has been much hedging over their claim because of the overseas company’s involvement.

In another case, there appears to be government involvement in a claim at Schmidtsdrift, about 80 km west of Kimberley. A black economic empowerment company New Diamond Corporation (NDC) was accused by the claimants of acquiring the land “illegally” (22) Claimants say “political forces” have prevented the community from obtaining their mineral rights from the NDC. In December 2002, lawyers representing 1 200 people who form part of the Schmidtsdrift community wrote to the Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs about the problem, and four months later they hadn’t received a reply.

The NDC holds 80% share in the Schmidtsdrift Mining Company and the community 20%. The dealings between the mining company, the NDC and the community are something of a cat’s nest. Five businessmen involved in African Renaissance Holdings, one of the companies within the NDC group, are reportedly part of President Thabo Mbeki’s Consultative Council.(23)

Without the diamonds, of course, Schmidtsdrift would hardly be on the map. A rocky dry place, most of its inhabitants do not have access to health facilities, there is no high school, and the majority of the people are unemployed and illiterate. The people are waiting to see what benefits they will receive from the mine.

South Africa’s biggest grape exporter told us his partnership with local people in the Kubus Fruit Farms in the Northern Cape is working. ... His company Karsten Boerdery has entered into an agreement with the Industrial Development Corporation and a black empowerment group to produce grapes for export. The project is predicted to bring in much needed foreign currency and create thousands of jobs..... Karsten Boerdery will control the operation and run the farms. The farm workers will be part of the project. Piet Karsten told us his group had been empowering their employees for years. His group already has 300 black shareholders. Dumping people on land and expecting them to farm with no support is a recipe for failure......The Kubus project is not part of the government’s land reform program, but is an example of cooperation within the agricultural community, Karsten says.....Despite the success of groups like the Karsten Boerdery, poverty lurks on the fringes of communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa’s most barren and harsh landscape. Farming here is the most difficult in South Africa, all the more reason for circumspection in deciding whether a land claim will be of benefit not only to the claimants but to the whole of South Africa.

A harsh terrain needs a highly skilled operation to be viable, something outside the parameters of South Africa’s aboriginal people who populate this desolate area. A new look at how to assist them is needed.

 

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Chapter XII, part 1:

(actually I see that I ran through this chapter twice, and I'll just post both, pardon any repetition please)

Chapter XII THE NORTH WEST PROVINCE

A member of organized agriculture in the district recently sent out a questionnaire to local farmers regarding their problems with crime, land claims and other matters. What came back was astonishing – there were few if any who could say they were not living under serious duress. Some situations were so bad, farmers had abandoned their properties. Others were living on their nerves, frustrated with what they were seeing around them and unable to do anything about it.


The land reform and restitution process plays out in North West as it does in the other South African provinces. We were regaled with the same tales of stock and crop theft, intimidation, vandalism and even murder. The map of North West land claims as at December 1998 is quite an eye opener. More than half this provincial map is blanketed with dots. One of the more controversial land claims in the province is that of Putfontein. With land restitution, the state has three options in the event of a successful land claim. The claim can be settled as follows:

• The return to the claimant of the specific land in respect of which a claim was lodged;
• Other land may be made available to the claimant; or
• Compensation may be granted to the claimant for the loss that was suffered.

If the State grants financial compensation, this is paid from the Treasury. The third party is the landowner. He plays no part in the action but is merely an interested party. But if the landowner is affected insofar as the claimants want his land, he becomes involved in the claim and must pay his own legal costs. It is not possible for him to obtain an order for costs against one of the other parties. If the restitution claim goes to court, the court must decide in what way the claimant will be compensated, i.e., in which of the above three ways.

Section 2.2 of the Restitution Act says that if the claimant had previously (at the time of his removal) received compensation, he or she may not apply again. (Italics ours). Many claimants in terms of the Restitution Act have in fact received compensation, yet they lodge claims all the same. Most claims are lodged in respect of specific land to which claimants want to return, irrespective of whether other land or compensation had been granted in the past.

Should the State wish to return the specific land to the claimant, and the present landowner must be evicted, the claimant must give up the existing land that was given to him before occupying the new land. This latter point is often ignored, and everything possible is done to return the original land to the claimant, whether they vacate their compensatory land or not.
Up to September 2001, for example, seventeen such claims had already been settled countrywide. Not one of the cases where land was returned resulted in successful agricultural production. Virtually all have resulted in failed settlements.

It should be noted that as soon as a claim is approved, a farmer’s security is affected: all production aid and financing are suspended. This places the landowner under enormous financial pressure.

The community which claimed Putfontein had already received ample reparation at the time of their previous dispossession, in the form of compensatory land and monetary compensation. The land they were living on at the time they made the claim against Putfontein possessed a good infrastructure. Yet the 6613 ha farm Putfontein was bought out for R13 million and given to the claiming community. Now this community owns Putfontein and the compensatory land they were originally given. They have in other words received double compensation.

On his particular 372 ha farm (there were seven farms on the original Putfontein), only six people are now living. The rest stayed in their old homes.

Previously, Putfontein created a combined income of R7 million a year, on which taxes were paid. Now there is nothing, and R13 million of taxpayer’s money is down the drain. The claimants now own two excellent pieces of farm land in the North West Province which produce absolutely nothing. At a handing-over ceremony in the year 2000, Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza urged the Batloung tribe to keep to their promise on land utilization. “It is important that this land be put to production instead of being turned into a squatter camp. You should not fail us.

(the Extension of Security of Tenure (Occupiers) Act 62 of 1997- became law on 28 November 1997)....The Act gives these occupiers the life-long right to occupy land which is not theirs.....The Act makes it extremely difficult to evict an occupier.......This seems to refer to the fact that South African commercial farmers of European descent have “caused” the homelessness and rootlessness of many indigenous peoples and that this “past practice” gives those now without land a “right” to occupy land not theirs.....Another factor to be considered is the security risk involved in evicting occupiers. In some instances, occupiers threaten the farmer with violence, or the farmer learns through the grapevine that he would be ill-advised to evict an occupier. For the sake of his family’s security, he leaves the occupier and family where they are......In October 2000, Deputy Judge President of the Witwatersrand High Court Hermanus Flemming declared that the Act was unconstitutional. “Allowing people to choose to stay at another’s property whenever they choose and simply because they so choose, at the expense of others’ lawful rights, is clearly not land reform.”.....The wording throughout the Act gives the impression that the farmer would, if he could, exploit the occupier who is posed as something of a victim. The reality is that the South African farmer who has farmed labor-intensively instead of capital-intensively as a result of demographics, is now the victim of his benevolence, unlike his contemporaries throughout the Western world.

Mrs. Louise Viljoen (not her real name) is the owner of a North West farm. In October 2000, her husband was murdered in his study by five young black men. They took nothing. The five men were from Alexandra Township, near Sandton in Gauteng. (Mrs. Viljoen believes the killers were especially brought in for the job). They cut the telephone lines and looked for her to attack as well, but she managed to escape. They knew the house’s layout well.

One of the five had lived on her property, without her permission, for a month before the killing. Two months before her husband died, this young man visited her husband saying he was the local secretary of the ANC and that he represented the farm workers. He sat in their living room and her husband gave him tea, drove him to the nearest town after their meeting and paid for his taxi fare back to Johannesburg. He told her husband his workers “hated” him. Mrs. Viljoen tried to remove some antagonistic former workers from her farm. She paid them off and even offered to build dwellings in town for them, but they wouldn’t budge. They informed her the houses on the farm which her husband built “belong to the state”.

Before her husband died, he received phone calls at night where nothing was said but there was clearly someone on the line. After he died, an ANC councilor from the Klerksdorp municipality informed Mrs. Viljoen that she must now allow the people working on her farm to have her farm. In answer to our question – was there a connection between the murderers and the ANC, she replied: “Definitely. The police checked the telephone number one of them gave my husband – it was the ANC’s Shell House number. The ANC then informed the police they were no longer in Shell House and that they did not know that person”. (We print both Mrs. Viljoen’s statement and the ANC’s reply.)

The Department of Land Affairs continues to ask Mrs. Viljoen if she wants to sell her farm. She continues to refuse, because the farm was built up for her children’s inheritance, she says. Then she was told she would have to give a piece of land “as a donation”. Intimidation increased. She then received a letter dated 10 September 2003 from “Scorpion Legal Protection (Pty) Ltd.” acting on behalf of “Our clients: your employees – water and electricity ” (which was the heading of the letter).

The letter said Scorpion’s clients advise “that their water and electricity have been cut without any valid reason. According to the Tenure Act of 1997, Chapters 3, 5 and 6, our clients should enjoy their privileges.” The letter was signed by Mr. T.J. Gaanakgomo. Eighty hectares of her grazing land was set on fire in 2003. Mrs. Viljoen’s son saw men in a car who set fire to the ground, and gave the police the registration number but the police appear to have done nothing with this information. Her 700 ha farm is typical of a good commercial farm in the area, producing mealies and sunflowers, and an excellent Angus stud herd. Since her husband was murdered, she left the farm and members of her family stay there. They have dropped the crop farming and now only farm with the Angus herd.

She experiences endless trouble with people who occupy her worker’s houses and won’t get out. They throw stones at the people who run her farm and squat outside her farmhouse front gate, making it difficult for the farmhouse’s occupants to come and go. There is much antagonism and continual belligerence, and she feels this is part of the program to move her and her family off the farm, to make it so unpleasant that they will give up and go. Her own farm workers must be fetched from neighbouring farms every day and taken back. There are always confrontations, she reports. At one stage she had to bring in the SA National Defence Force to remove the workers’ cattle off her farm. These workers nearly killed the SANDF personnel.

 

[gsvol]

Chapter XII, part 2:

She confirms the Department of Land Affairs continues to pressure her to allow people to farm on her land. She told us a black man phoned her one day and said “they” are going to shoot two of her workers. As in so many other crime cases in South Africa, friends or relatives of a crime victim find it unfathomable why that particular person was chosen. “My husband was such a kind person. He was always the one at meetings who said we must negotiate with the black people. He wanted to help them: he believed in training. He went out of his way to help the black people, he always wanted to have good relationships”.

The Department of Land Affairs continues to ask Mrs. Viljoen if she wants to sell her farm. She continues to refuse, because the farm was built up for her children’s inheritance, she says. Then she was told she would have to give a piece of land “as a donation”. Intimidation increased. She then received a letter dated 10 September 2003 from “Scorpion Legal Protection (Pty) Ltd.” acting on behalf of “Our clients: your employees – water and electricity ” (which was the heading of the letter).

The letter said Scorpion’s clients advise “that their water and electricity have been cut without any valid reason. According to the Tenure Act of 1997, Chapters 3, 5 and 6, our clients should enjoy their privileges.” The letter was signed by Mr. T.J. Gaanakgomo. Eighty hectares of her grazing land was set on fire in 2003. Mrs. Viljoen’s son saw men in a car who set fire to the ground, and gave the police the registration number but the police appear to have done nothing with this information. Her 700 ha farm is typical of a good commercial farm in the area, producing mealies and sunflowers, and an excellent Angus stud herd. Since her husband was murdered, she left the farm and members of her family stay there. They have dropped the crop farming and now only farm with the Angus herd.

She experiences endless trouble with people who occupy her worker’s houses and won’t get out. They throw stones at the people who run her farm and squat outside her farmhouse front gate, making it difficult for the farmhouse’s occupants to come and go. There is much antagonism and continual belligerence, and she feels this is part of the program to move her and her family off the farm, to make it so unpleasant that they will give up and go. Her own farm workers must be fetched from neighbouring farms every day and taken back. There are always confrontations, she reports. At one stage she had to bring in the SA National Defence Force to remove the workers’ cattle off her farm. These workers nearly killed the SANDF personnel.

A farm is handed over and is ruined, but the damage doesn’t stop there. Surrounding farms suffer because of environmental problems (no water, electricity, or rubbish and sewage removal), crime, broken fences and the theft of cattle, and the lowering of farm values in the market.

This farmer abandoned his Hartbeesfontein farm two years ago. It produced beef and had excellent grazing, with a good strong water supply and some boreholes. Mr. Meyer’s problem was the positioning of his farm – it was near a location. (A neighbour told us that in South Africa, the closer to a location or a tribal rural area, the greater the crime. This doesn’t say much for the people in those areas, he says wryly.) Farmer Meyer’s cattle were stolen and slaughtered, and his fencing was stolen. His trees were cut down and burnt for firewood. The water pumps were stolen, the cattle pens were stripped. Despite abandoning the farm, he still had to pay tax on the land because it was shown on his balance sheet as an “asset”.

The thieves broke his cement dam and the wind pumps. They stole the pipes from the boreholes and removed every piece of equipment on the farm. He sees this as unambiguous intimidation, and this is why he eventually abandoned the farm. His family was threatened and told “not to come back”. Nearby black farmers are also robbed of their crops, said one of Meyer’s neighbours. Many really tried but the crime was too much for them. They have the same problem as the white farmers. There is no law and order, they say. There’s no prosecution of the criminals. The police are simply incapable of handling the problems. Foreign cattle are allowed to roam through private property and when property owners go to court to try and remove the cattle, the court is told the miscreants did not know it was private property. Sometimes the sentence is 30 days, and we have to spend time in court, said Mr. Meyer. Then the criminals are out the next day.

Prestigious buildings built during the homeland era have been vandalized. The boreholes are plugged with stones. The people are living in dams there. They have broken the dam walls and put corrugated iron roofing on the dam. Seven black farmers who took over an area after the homeland was abolished have been reduced to three now. They also suffer from theft.

“There is great potential if people want to work”, says Mr. Coetzee. “They prefer stealing to working,

All their complaints are similar. They farm near Sannieshof and Fochville. Crop and stock theft, stock gates opened at night, high unemployment surrounding their farms. All of these farms were family farms. The Oosthuizens farmed in the area from 1908. Their 4 500 ha family farm was productive in beef and grain.

Black families were given R15 000 each under the old “Derek Hanekom scheme” as it is called by local farmers, and nearby farms were purchased. Now they are squatter camps feeding off productive farms nearby.

The squatters steal anything they can lay their hands on – copper valves, steel gates, even the feeding troughs. The police caught some of them red-handed and they were charged but given bail. They stole again, were caught, charged and given bail again. Out for the second time, they stole again, were caught, charged, and given bail for a third time. The police tell the farmers confidentially that some courts ruin their policing by letting the criminals off. The police are discouraged. Who wouldn’t be?

The Pretorius family abandoned their farm in August 2003. Everything was stolen. Members of the family were threatened with death. Eight percent of their harvest of 60/80 tons of grain was stolen. The local municipality bought the neighbouring farm for a black empowerment group. It is now a basic, subsistence operation. The farm is full of weeds, and there is no labour evident. The new empowerment farmer says he can’t afford to pay labour. Mr. Pretorius made an interesting comment to us – “despite the failures”, he says, “they (the Department of Land Affairs) do not stop with their hopeless policy. They simply make things worse. They don’t learn from their mistakes.

Farmer T. Viljoen tells us of a neighbouring farm which was bought for a black empowerment group for R1 million. Six hundred hectares in size, it had a flourishing dairy and beef herd and excellent water. Today nothing is happening at that farm. There are no implements, no tractors. Sixty or seventy families occupy the farm and they have no income. Mr. Viljoen promised the DLA in Lichtenburg he would help these new black neighbours - the DLA just had to tell him what to do. The department never came back to him.
As for the old Bophuthatswana tribal land into which so much money was pumped in the old National Party days, blacks do not farm there anymore and whites are renting some of the farmland.

There are scores more names, with the same complaints. One particular story caught our attention. A 700 ha insolvent chicken farm outside Lichtenburg was bought by the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) in May 2003. Five ANC youth members formed a Community Property Association (CPA) and the farm was given to them.

The road to the property was rebuilt, the farm buildings were spruced up and the house was painted and refurbished. There was a spirited handover ceremony attended by at least 500 people. Two air force helicopters were used to bring in dignitaries, and many policemen attended the ceremony. One hundred and twenty cows were given to the youth as a kick-off present from the government. We believe the young men are looking for funding to salvage this operation which is not running well.

There are many more stories in Chapter XII, last but not Least

We cannot possibly mention this farmer’s name, nor where he farms. Suffice it to say it is in the North West Province. We telephoned him with regard to reports we had heard about the continual and relentless theft he experiences on his farm. He answered the telephone in a soft voice. We thought he was ill, and asked him if we could call back. No, he said, I’ll talk to you now. He confirmed the nearly R350 000 worth of theft he had experienced in one year. We asked him about an attack on his person some years ago, and how was he managing today. Yes, he said, I was stabbed several times in the throat with a long spike. Hence his difficulty in speaking - his vocal chords had been damaged. Stunned, we said goodbye and put down the phone.

So this is farming in South Africa today. A good decent man who, if his forefathers had gone to any other new world country, would be living the life he deserves, after all the years of hard and dedicated work on the land. No, fellow South Africans, this is not how it should be. Something must be done!

 

[gsvol]

Chapter XII, part 1:
(again, sorry about repeating this chapter)gs

Chapter XII THE NORTH WEST PROVINCE

South African author Herman Charles Bosman immortalized the Marico district in what is now called the North West Province. In his day, life was simpler and Bosman’s whimsical tales of the people of that part of the world are all the more evocative when one considers what is taking place on a daily basis to farmers in this special and beloved part of South Africa. A member of organized agriculture in the district recently sent out a questionnaire to local farmers regarding their problems with crime, land claims and other matters. What came back was astonishing – there were few if any who could say they were not living under serious duress. Some situations were so bad, farmers had abandoned their properties. Others were living on their nerves, frustrated with what they were seeing around them and unable to do anything about it.

The land reform and restitution process plays out in North West as it does in the other South African provinces. We were regaled with the same tales of stock and crop theft, intimidation, vandalism and even murder. The map of North West land claims as at December 1998 is quite an eye opener. More than half this provincial map is blanketed with dots. One of the more controversial land claims in the province is that of Putfontein. With land restitution, the state has three options in the event of a successful land claim. The claim can be settled as follows:

• The return to the claimant of the specific land in respect of which a claim was lodged;
• Other land may be made available to the claimant; or
• Compensation may be granted to the claimant for the loss that was suffered.

If the State grants financial compensation, this is paid from the Treasury. The third party is the landowner. He plays no part in the action but is merely an interested party. But if the landowner is affected insofar as the claimants want his land, he becomes involved in the claim and must pay his own legal costs. It is not possible for him to obtain an order for costs against one of the other parties. If the restitution claim goes to court, the court must decide in what way the claimant will be compensated, i.e., in which of the above three ways.

Section 2.2 of the Restitution Act says that if the claimant had previously (at the time of his removal) received compensation, he or she may not apply again. (Italics ours). Many claimants in terms of the Restitution Act have in fact received compensation, yet they lodge claims all the same. Most claims are lodged in respect of specific land to which claimants want to return, irrespective of whether other land or compensation had been granted in the past.

Should the State wish to return the specific land to the claimant, and the present landowner must be evicted, the claimant must give up the existing land that was given to him before occupying the new land. This latter point is often ignored, and everything possible is done to return the original land to the claimant, whether they vacate their compensatory land or not.

Up to September 2001, for example, seventeen such claims had already been settled countrywide. Not one of the cases where land was returned resulted in successful agricultural production.

As mentioned, a perfect example of this anomaly is Putfontein, near Coligny in the North West. The claim took six years from the time the claim was approved to the time the farmer was paid out. It should be noted that as soon as a claim is approved, a farmer’s security is affected: all production aid and financing are suspended. This places the landowner under enormous financial pressure. The community which claimed Putfontein had already received ample reparation at the time of their previous dispossession, in the form of compensatory land and monetary compensation. The land they were living on at the time they made the claim against Putfontein possessed a good infrastructure. Yet the 6613 ha farm Putfontein was bought out for R13 million and given to the claiming community. Now this community owns Putfontein and the compensatory land they were originally given. They have in other words received double compensation.

Only a quarter of the original community came back to live at Putfontein, which had excellent irrigation and boreholes. Now nothing is happening at Putfontein, just subsistence farming and squatting. Some parts of the farm are being hired out to white farmers because the claimants cannot farm. They steal from their neighbours – cattle and grain - which they sell because they cannot make a living on the farm.. There is no electricity, no fencing, and the boreholes are not working. The original Putfontein farm was highly successful, cultivating mealies and peanuts. There was an excellent beef herd with a dairy, plus successful sheep farming. One of the farmers said he spent a lifetime and thousands of rands nourishing the soil on his farm, On his particular 372 ha farm (there were seven farms on the original Putfontein), only six people are now living. The rest stayed in their old homes.

Previously, Putfontein created a combined income of R7 million a year, on which taxes were paid. Now there is nothing, and R13 million of taxpayer’s money is down the drain. The claimants now own two excellent pieces of farm land in the North West Province which produce absolutely nothing.

Chapter III of the Act covers the “fundamental rights” of occupiers. The language of the Act is seen to favor the occupiers. The use of the word “fundamental” implies that the occupier has basic rights to occupy land which is not his. Thus those who wrote this law have decreed that occupying someone else’s land (even though with the consent, tacit or not, of the owner) conveys on the occupier a fundamental and even an inalienable right. Surely this is a first in the world!

An occupier’s right of residence can only be terminated if such termination is “just and equitable”. Further, the courts will not grant an eviction order unless the owner makes alternative accommodation available – Chapter IV, Section 9. What represents “suitable” accommodation is also set down in the Act, and in most cases the farmer is unable to find this “suitable” accommodation and he simply buys a piece of ground somewhere else and gives the occupier building materials with which to build a house.

Another problem inherent in evictions is that the farmer must be subjected to a departmental investigation as to whether an eviction “will affect the constitutional rights of any affected person, including the rights of children, if any, to education”. (Section 9, Clause (3) (b). This Act’s raison d’etre is to facilitate long-term security of land tenure to a person who has resided on land as an occupier (even if he has not worked or does not work for the person who owns the land). The Act makes it extremely difficult to evict an occupier. The Act states unequivocally that this “situation” (where someone occupies land which is not his) is “in part the result of past discriminatory laws and practices”. This seems to refer to the fact that South African commercial farmers of European descent have “caused” the homelessness and rootlessness of many indigenous peoples and that this “past practice” gives those now without land a “right” to occupy land not theirs.

Another factor to be considered is the security risk involved in evicting occupiers. In some instances, occupiers threaten the farmer with violence, or the farmer learns through the grapevine that he would be ill-advised to evict an occupier. For the sake of his family’s security, he leaves the occupier and family where they are. The Act has come in for some criticism in the courts. In October 2000, Deputy Judge President of the Witwatersrand High Court Hermanus Flemming declared that the Act was unconstitutional. “Allowing people to choose to stay at another’s property whenever they choose and simply because they so choose, at the expense of others’ lawful rights, is clearly not land reform.” (2)

 

[gsvol]

Chapter XII, part 2:

Thus the South African farmers, in not mechanizing and being consistently encouraged to adopt a labour-intensive farming operation to absorb South Africa’s huge mass of unemployables, is now penalized for his actions. Occupiers are referred to as “vulnerable” in the preamble to the Act. The wording throughout the Act gives the impression that the farmer would, if he could, exploit the occupier who is posed as something of a victim. The reality is that the South African farmer who has farmed labor-intensively instead of capital-intensively as a result of demographics, is now the victim of his benevolence, unlike his contemporaries throughout the Western world.).

Mrs. Louise Viljoen (not her real name) is the owner of a North West farm. In October 2000, her husband was murdered in his study by five young black men. They took nothing. The five men were from Alexandra Township, near Sandton in Gauteng. (Mrs. Viljoen believes the killers were especially brought in for the job). They cut the telephone lines and looked for her to attack as well, but she managed to escape. They knew the house’s layout well.

One of the five had lived on her property, without her permission, for a month before the killing. Two months before her husband died, this young man visited her husband saying he was the local secretary of the ANC and that he represented the farm workers. He sat in their living room and her husband gave him tea, drove him to the nearest town after their meeting and paid for his taxi fare back to Johannesburg. He told her husband his workers “hated” him. Mrs. Viljoen tried to remove some antagonistic former workers from her farm. She paid them off and even offered to build dwellings in town for them, but they wouldn’t budge. They informed her the houses on the farm which her husband built “belong to the state”.

Before her husband died, he received phone calls at night where nothing was said but there was clearly someone on the line. After he died, an ANC councilor from the Klerksdorp municipality informed Mrs. Viljoen that she must now allow the people working on her farm to have her farm. In answer to our question – was there a connection between the murderers and the ANC, she replied: “Definitely. The police checked the telephone number one of them gave my husband – it was the ANC’s Shell House number. The ANC then informed the police they were no longer in Shell House and that they did not know that person”. (We print both Mrs. Viljoen’s statement and the ANC’s reply.)

The Department of Land Affairs continues to ask Mrs. Viljoen if she wants to sell her farm. She continues to refuse, because the farm was built up for her children’s inheritance, she says. Then she was told she would have to give a piece of land “as a donation”. Intimidation increased. She then received a letter dated 10 September 2003 from “Scorpion Legal Protection (Pty) Ltd.” acting on behalf of “Our clients: your employees – water and electricity ” (which was the heading of the letter).

The letter said Scorpion’s clients advise “that their water and electricity have been cut without any valid reason. According to the Tenure Act of 1997, Chapters 3, 5 and 6, our clients should enjoy their privileges.” The letter was signed by Mr. T.J. Gaanakgomo. Eighty hectares of her grazing land was set on fire in 2003. Mrs. Viljoen’s son saw men in a car who set fire to the ground, and gave the police the registration number but the police appear to have done nothing with this information. Her 700 ha farm is typical of a good commercial farm in the area, producing mealies and sunflowers, and an excellent Angus stud herd. Since her husband was murdered, she left the farm and members of her family stay there. They have dropped the crop farming and now only farm with the Angus herd.

She experiences endless trouble with people who occupy her worker’s houses and won’t get out. They throw stones at the people who run her farm and squat outside her farmhouse front gate, making it difficult for the farmhouse’s occupants to come and go. There is much antagonism and continual belligerence, and she feels this is part of the program to move her and her family off the farm, to make it so unpleasant that they will give up and go. Her own farm workers must be fetched from neighbouring farms every day and taken back. There are always confrontations, she reports. At one stage she had to bring in the SA National Defence Force to remove the workers’ cattle off her farm. These workers nearly killed the SANDF personnel.

She confirms the Department of Land Affairs continues to pressure her to allow people to farm on her land. She told us a black man phoned her one day and said “they” are going to shoot two of her workers. As in so many other crime cases in South Africa, friends or relatives of a crime victim find it unfathomable why that particular person was chosen. “My husband was such a kind person. He was always the one at meetings who said we must negotiate with the black people. He wanted to help them: he believed in training. He went out of his way to help the black people, he always wanted to have good relationships”.

Mr. P.J. Meyer; This farmer abandoned his Hartbeesfontein farm two years ago. It produced beef and had excellent grazing, with a good strong water supply and some boreholes. Mr. Meyer’s problem was the positioning of his farm – it was near a location. (A neighbour told us that in South Africa, the closer to a location or a tribal rural area, the greater the crime. This doesn’t say much for the people in those areas, he says wryly.) Farmer Meyer’s cattle were stolen and slaughtered, and his fencing was stolen. His trees were cut down and burnt for firewood. The water pumps were stolen, the cattle pens were stripped. Despite abandoning the farm, he still had to pay tax on the land because it was shown on his balance sheet as an “asset”.

The thieves broke his cement dam and the wind pumps. They stole the pipes from the boreholes and removed every piece of equipment on the farm. He sees this as unambiguous intimidation, and this is why he eventually abandoned the farm. His family was threatened and told “not to come back”. Nearby black farmers are also robbed of their crops, said one of Meyer’s neighbours. Many really tried but the crime was too much for them. They have the same problem as the white farmers. There is no law and order, they say. There’s no prosecution of the criminals.

(Chapter XII goes on to detail at least a dozen other stories, virtually all the same.)gs

So this is farming in South Africa today. A good decent man who, if his forefathers had gone to any other new world country, would be living the life he deserves, after all the years of hard and dedicated work on the land.

 

[gsvol]

Chapter XIII, part 1:

Chapter XIII THE PROVINCE OF GAUTENG

Gauteng province includes the huge industrial and residential complex of Johannesburg , Pretoria and the southern areas of Johannesburg, what used to be known as the PWV area – the Pretoria/Witwatersrand/Vereeniging complex.

One of the most serious social problems of this, South Africa’s most populous province, is human squatting and land invasions. On the outskirts of the cities, in the peri-urban and small-farming areas, farms have been invaded, while formerly-productive farmland lies fallow and untended.

In September 2000, Braam Duvenhage reported the illegal squatting of 50 people on his farm to the local police. Some arrests were made but eventually he was told that “the jails were full” and no more arrests could be made.(1) This opened the floodgates for more squatters to move on to the farm. Duvenhage farms commercially – the farm is his livelihood. He bought the farm in 1965 and grows soya beans, sorghum and maize. He spent his life developing the farm - 2 300 ha in size – and now squatters have occupied 40 ha of it. He bought the property from a mining company and there was no land claim on the farm.

Eventually the squatter figure rose to 40 000 and included Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. Duvenhage blames the squatters’ boldness on the contemporary Bredell incident where members of the Pan African Congress (PAC) sold plots for R25 on a piece of private land. Two farmers, the government, Transnet and Eskom jointly owned the occupied Bredell land, also on the East Rand. In Duvenhage’s affidavit to court, he declared that in May 2000, 400 squatters had erected 50 shacks and had unlawfully occupied his land. Local police tried unsuccessfully to remove the squatters (italics ours) until a final court order was granted against the squatters in April 2001. (2) They were to go within two months, but they never moved. Duvenhage then called on the government to act in terms of the sheriff’s order to have the squatters removed.
He was informed it would cost him R1,8 million to have the 40 000 people on his farm removed, money that Duvenhage certainly did not have.

In September, the farmer asked the High Court to enforce the order handed down in the Witwatersrand High Court to evict the people from his land. But the case was defended by the State President, the ministers of agriculture and land affairs, housing and safety and security, the commissioner of police and the local municipal council. The squatters have illegal electricity connections and for water, they tapped into a pipe line from a nearby settlement. “For food they pinch crops from my farm”, said the 73-year-old farmer.(3) “Recently we traced a ton of maize worth R70 000 stolen from my farm.” One of his tractors simply disappeared and he receives threatening phone calls. In May 2001, Duvenhage was already out of pocket by R200 000 for legal fees. He was forced to go to the higher court to get the local court order enforced. Because of these legal delays, more squatters arrived by the busload. For practical purposes, says Duvenhage, a private property owner in South Africa who cannot afford to pay to remove illegal squatters has in effect lost his land.

Duvenhage’s farm borders on the Daveyton township where “crime is rife and an ever-expanding morass of shacks and filth has swallowed once-fertile fields”.(4) He now finds the farm a trap, as do so many other South African farmers. What was planned as a nest egg for his sons has now become a burden, and he would sell it tomorrow if – and it’s a big if – someone would buy it. “At least Mugabe tells the farmers straight ‘I’m going to take your land’. But in South Africa, a High Court judge orders that the squatters be removed and the government ignores it”, complained Duvenhage. (5) “President Mbeki keeps on saying that what’s happening in Zimbabwe won’t happen here. But it’s happening. If this is not a farm invasion, then I don’t know what is!”

In the Bredell case mentioned above, the government was granted an order to evict the squatters from what was, in part, government land. But other cases have not been so easily solved. Squatter camps have completely encircled Johannesburg and its suburbs. Further north, in March 2003, squatters made themselves at home right in the heart of the up-market suburb of Kosmos, on the Hartebeespoort Dam. The Johannesburg Central Business District’s buildings are full of squatters. Some simply seized control of buildings from landlords. In the Hillbrow area, now virtually under the control of Nigerians and known informally as “little Lagos”, drugs are sold openly and home-made abattoirs have mushroomed in hotel and apartment rooms.
Pretoria’s parks are a haven for squatters who camp out near streams and rob nearby houses. Many come from other countries, including Lesotho and Swaziland. The Alberton railway station was reported as home to squatters. Nearby factories are regularly vandalized and/or burgled.

The Ekurhuleni municipality on the East Rand used taxpayers money to give free water to squatters.(7) There are 205 squatter camps in this municipality alone, of which 68 are illegally on private ground. A businessman north of Johannesburg told the press his business had gone from being worth R15 million to nothing, adding that he had lost R64 000 income a month. (8) Squatters occupy an adjacent property to his place of work. In December 2002, the businessman found a corpse on his property with a gunshot wound, and two days later police picked up another corpse in the next-door squatter camp with stab wounds. This citizen has already spent more than R750 000 to try and remove the squatters.

The place looked like a war zone, according to a journalist who visited the area.(9) Watchtowers had been built and were manned 24 hours a day. Houses looked like forts and many had been sold for a song. One couple told the journalist they had had thirteen break-ins over the past four years. In one two week period, they were broken into eight times. Insurance companies have for years now refused to insure properties and contents in the area. An “idyllic retirement farm” became a “putrid nightmare” for Mr. Blackie Swart when squatters invaded his property. “They have used my home, my farm as a toilet”, he lamented(10). Mr. Swart sold his working farm and bought his retirement property at Hartebeespoort where he believed he would be able to live in peace and quiet.

A nearby squatters camp has made his life a misery. “They walk through my farm as if it were a public thoroughfare. They slaughtered my cattle and broke the wire fence. They use our farm and its buildings as a huge toilet and shower ground. When the wind changes, the smell is unbearable”, declares Mr. Swart. More than twelve telephone calls to the Madibeng municipality were completely ignored. Because he complained about the squatters, his animal forage was burned, so much so that the whole farm nearly burnt down. Despite his visits to the police, nothing has happened to the case he opened.

“They even stole the sleepers off the nearby railway line”, complained Mr. Swart. Mrs. Poeka Eckard, a lady farmer in the area, says the squatters do what they want. (11) “We have stopped farming with sheep. They are stolen day after day and we find the legs in the veld. The pipes from our borehole was stolen three times this year”.

Sometimes the court’s judgments encourage squatters. In July 2001, a judgment in the Witwatersrand High Court left the door wide open for other land invaders to legally challenge eviction orders. After a four-year wrangle, the Northern Metropolitan Local Council lost its move to rid Kya Sands and Houtkoppen, north of Johannesburg, of squatters. Judge J. Mlambo found that officials had no authority to apply for the eviction and that eviction notices should have been served in the home language of the squatters!

 

[gsvol]

Chapter XIII, part 2:

Since this particular judicial outcome, hundreds more squatters have moved in with alacrity. A local resident claimed “it is an open secret that many of the so-called squatters own one or more houses in Soweto and other townships, bought with government first-time buyer’s subsidies. They rent out these houses, and then come and squat in our area.” “If the eviction notices must be served in the squatter’s own language, then they should be written in Shona (from Zimbabwe) and Portuguese ( from Mozambique). It is also known the local warlord is a Nigerian, so maybe the court should have issued an eviction order in that language too!”

It is not unusual in South Africa to see whole residences plundered and carried off brick by brick. Residents of the small-holdings at Mapleton, near Boksburg on the East Rand were tormented day and night by more than 200 squatters who stole everything that moves, and fixed property as well.

Anyone who goes on vacation can find their house gone when they come back. Mrs. Lorraine White who lived in the area for 50 years said it used to be a veritable paradise.(12) It doesn’t help to put up fences, she said. They are broken within hours. Dogs are poisoned, and everything is stolen. People who couldn’t sell their houses simply left, and the empty houses were dismantled brick by brick. The police were informed, but nothing was done.
Two years ago, squatters armed with hacksaws, spades, forks and hoes invaded privately-owned plots near the Rietvlei Dam outside Pretoria, but were forced off by public order police and private security guards hired to keep them away.(13)

Leaving behind them the poles they had brought to demarcate stands (plots), the group marched back to where they came from. They informed the police they were the “advance party” sent to clear the land and threatened the residents that they’d be back “with 10 000 people”. This was the third time the squatters had tried to occupy the private small-holdings.
On a previous occasion, a High Court interdict was obtained to prevent an invasion and 4 000 structures which had been set up, were removed. It was discovered that many squatters came from as far away as KwaZulu/Natal. During the latest invasion, the squatters told security guards they were “testing the water to see what happens”.

Early in 2003, the Johannesburg City council had to evict squatters from an empty clinic in the city. More than 400 people were found there, and firearms were discovered in the building. (15) Only two floors of the nine floor building were occupied until evictions occurred. Medical refuse such as swabs, used syringes, bandages and bloodied gloves were among the debris carried out of the building by officials. Rentals were charged by self-appointed “landlords” to live in the building.

In a final insult to injury, a January 2003 report revealed a Mogale City councilor had called upon police to protect illegal squatters on a farm in the Magaliesburg district, north west of Johannesburg. Neels Oosthuizen, attorney for property owner Richard Theron* (1) said it was clear the Mogale city councilor had encouraged squatters to seize his client’s farm.
“Councilor Mabe** (2) has actively incited the illegal land seizure to the point of calling in armed and uniformed municipal police to intimidate my client, after he has succeeded at great personal financial cost to resolve the illegal settlement issue. This is an extremely ominous development as the farm seizures in Zimbabwe started the same way, with groups of squatters seizing land with official ruling-party support”, Mr. Oosthuizen said..

On that note we end the squatter stories. Can any civilized country imagine that its citizens would have their property rights treated with such contempt?

* (1) Update: Richard Theron and his wife were murdered on 5 June 2004.

**(2) Councillor Peace Mabe (Mogale City / Krugersdorp) is on record as saying to the now murdered Richard Theron “Your attitude will be the reason for another farm murder”. Numerous death threats were received by Theron, and despite pleading for protection via calls & letters to local Police, Police headquarters and several other parties, both were brutally murdered.

The Rust de Winter land, 75 km from Pretoria, was originally an irrigation scheme created by the old National Party government. Around 100 plots of approximately 25 ha each were sold to commercial farmers who cultivated cotton, tobacco and vegetables. It was a highly successful and productive scheme. In 1978, the government bought out the farmers and in the eighties, this land was incorporated into the newly-formed Bophuthatswana homeland, under the SA Development Trust.

Today this land has turned to dust. There is nothing but a barren landscape, and the former post office, co-op , local store and filling station have disappeared. Empty houses dot the landscape. At present the water from Rust de Winter dams is supplying nearby townships. This was very well-developed, irrigated land which now lies in ruins. The government should resuscitate this land for its land restitution beneficiaries instead of taking productive farm land for the purpose.

An interesting phenomenon has manifested itself east of Pretoria. The farm Kleinsonderhout between Bapsfontein and Bronkhorstspruit was sold by a white farmer to a black gentleman who now “farms” squatters. There are now more than 2 000 people on this once-productive farm, each paying rent to the new owner. There is no sewage, no potable water, no electricity. Naturally, the residents are stealing from the neighbouring farms. Now the squatters are demanding “services”, although they are 28 km from Bronkhorstspruit.

In Kekana Gardens, near Hammanskraal, a 1 000 ha cattle and game farm belonging to a Mr. Roos is under siege. Mr. Roos wished to sell but couldn’t get his price. A local warlord is believed to have supported the invasion of squatters onto Mr. Roos’ farm. There are now 4 000 people there, living in shacks with no sewage or electricity. The Standard Bank is believed to have spent R45 000 to connect a water pipeline for the residents.

The above reveals under what pressure South Africa’s cities and peri-urban areas are. We have quoted Gauteng examples but the pattern is the same, to a greater or lesser degree, in all South Africa’s cities and towns. Squatting is here to stay, as are land invasions and intimidation of those who resist.

 

[gsvol]

Chapter IX:

Chapter XIV BLYDEVOORUITZICHT NO MORE: KWAZULU / NATAL

Blydevooruitzicht: Dutch for “Joyous Prospects” - the name given to the land of Natal by the Boer trekkers in the 1830s on account of the rich potential of that region.

We have dealt with Vryheid and Kranskop and the Dunns of Northern Natal as separate chapters, which says much for the province of KwaZulu/Natal as a contentious region where four of South Africa’s peoples – the Zulus, the whites, the coloureds and the Indians live side by side in the cities, but share an uneasy truce in the rural countryside.

It is also fitting that we end our provincial stories on land reform in KwaZulu/Natal. So much of South Africa’s world image is formulated around this part of the country – the Zulu wars, the British imperial expeditions, the Afrikaners and their treks, the oft-forgotten struggle of John Dunn’s descendants to gain title to land given to them by Zulu kings, and of course the Indians, most of whom call KZN their home.

Land reform in the province is a sorry story. As with the other provinces, we have collected scores of stories and anecdotes and have made so many personal connections with people involved in a thwarted and skewed land restitution and handover process that this book could go on forever.

Mr. Serfie Serfontein farms cattle at Newcastle. Six of his young cows and a stud bull worth R24 000 were cruelly stabbed with spears on his farm. We noticed this in a Johannesburg newspaper (1) and telephoned him. He sent us some gripping photos which we have printed.
Mr. Serfontein said it took 50 years of breeding to get close to the perfect Bonsmara bull, ‘which mine nearly was. Now I’ve not only lost him but all the calves he would have sired. I can’t afford to buy another bull”, he said. The bull had been shot, as were three heifers.

His cows were herded into the cattle pens and then stabbed with spears near their hearts. Only one carcass had part of its hind quarters missing, a sign of vindictive killings not for the pot. He believes he is being chased off his 940 ha farm where he has to contend with young Zulu men hunting his animals with dogs. And the police, we asked? The newspaper report said Police Captain Polla Paulsen declared the police were investigating the slaughter. “We are doing everything in our power to bring the culprits to book”, he told the press. So what happened? Nothing, said Mr. Serfontein. They took photos and opened a docket and that’s the last I heard of them. One policemen told him “if you know or suspect who they are, you must catch them for us”.

Mr. Serfontein believes the mutilation of cattle echoes the Zimbabwean farmer’s troubles at the beginning of the land grab era. We would also mention that the cruel mutilation of cattle and pets was a hallmark of the Mau Mau era in Kenya’s terror tactics against the mainly white farming community before independence.

In another instance, farmer Roy Ferguson of Vryheid noticed that the tails of seven of his stud cattle had been severed. The tails were “savagely hacked off” according to Mr. Ferguson. He said it appeared the culprits “swung a machete in the general direction of the cows’ tails in the dark”. In the process they inflicted severe wounds on the back of the cows’ legs.(2) One cow had to be destroyed, five had to be sewn up and treated by a vet for infection. Another cow disappeared, and probably died.

Some of Mr. Fergusons’ pigs’ tails were also cut. Through the grapevine he discovered the thieves use these animal tails as whisks – they push a stick up through the tail skin – and that this purportedly provides immunity from being caught while stealing cattle. They sell these tails as fly whisks for this purpose.

As with Mr. Serfontein, farmer Ferguson reported the matter to the police who took some photographs, took the names of the perpetrators (yes, the farmer knew who committed the deeds), and weren’t heard of again.
(The police understand that should they actually enforce the law then they are subject to the ire of the ANC and perhaps a Goodyear necklace compliments of Winnie Mandela's henchmen!!!)

We had heard rumblings about the Flats for some time, but it was difficult to find anyone who would talk to us. Eventually we found someone in Swaziland who had become disillusioned with the ANC-led local council. He told us the 10 000 ha flats had been Crown land, and that the old National Party government had allocated it to commercial farmers. The land was then incorporated into Kwa Zulu as part of a proposed homeland consolidation. There was much activity – extension officers were appointed, small-scale farming was started with sugar cane and maize. An experimental station was built.

With the advent of the ANC government, most of the people from the “old order” were thrown out and replaced with political appointments. They were not trained, declared our contact. “The place had great potential, but it was underutilized” he said. “The new management was supposed to have business plans but we didn’t see them.” Then the real rot set in. There were severe water supply problems and eventually all the machinery was auctioned. A mentor/manager/joint venture partner has now been brought in to get things right. We are told that no new sugar cane had been planted for 8 to 10 years. Because of these problems brought about by the new political correctness, only 65 tons of cane was being harvested per hectare as opposed to the previous 120 tons per hectare.

Piet is a South African small farmer. He owns a 1 100 ha farm in Mkuze. Originally he farmed sisal and employed 142 people. The government’s new labour laws affected the relationship between him and his staff. He took up the sisal crop and replaced it with vegetables and fruit and downsized to 55 employees. Then a new law was announced - if you have more than 50 employees, some of them must serve on your board. Then came the minimum wage legislation. He laid off more than half his work force, ending up with 22 employees, farming tomatoes and running a game farm.

He downsized from 142 to 22 employees because of labour and wage laws. His game is now the victim of theft and poaching. His fence wires are regularly cut – he is next to a location and he wants to sell out. His son was attacked on the farm and emigrated. That in a nutshell is the latter-day “story of an African farm”.

His children are not interested in carrying on farming. In fact, they have left the country.

 

[utvolpj]

cliffs?

 

[WA_Vol]

cliff note version of the cliff note version please