Be creative with land redistribution
IADDRESSED a packed hall of farm workers and activists from the Breede Valley in the Cape winelands on Workers’ Day.
I was addressing the meeting on behalf of the Democracy from Below Campaign. The workers’ rally, held in the small town of Robertson in the Boland, was organised by the Mawubuye Land Rights Movement and the Commercial Stevedoring Agricultural & Allied Workers Union.
Robertson’s economy relies on the grape and fruit farms, producing some well-known wines, but it was obvious that the town had not changed much since apartheid.
The Cape winelands came into the spotlight when farm workers joined a strike to demand better working conditions.
Although their demand of R150 a day was not met, the sectoral determination increased wages from a daily minimum of R65 to R105 a day. The package includes leave pay, sick pay and maternity benefits.
However, many workers – mostly women and union leaders – have been retrenched and evicted from the farms. For most workers on farms, where they work is where they live, and when they lose their jobs they also lose their homes.
The bosses are deducting for transport and have raised rentals and electricity. The new situation after the strike threatens to reverse the gains that farm workers fought for.
A simple solution would be for the government to negotiate with the farmers to allocate land to the retrenched workers, and support and train them to become small farmers.
People have the power to transform their lives and their communities. In other parts of Africa, like Kenya and Burundi, it is through smallholdings that people are able to sustain themselves, producing food for their own needs and selling any excess they produce.
Families produce the coffee consumed by millions worldwide. Small farmers in Malawi are producing rice, beans and maize and are able to feed their families.
Democracy from Below is a campaign that aims to mobilise all South Africans to engage in our democracy and make it work for everyone. This means opening spaces to talk about democracy and how to make it work for all.
Democracy is much more than voting every five years. It is about participating in issues that concern us for the whole five years.
Since the release of the National Development Plan, the government has announced that it will discuss detailed plans and budget for implementing the plan at its July lekgotla.
The plan says we need to write a new story. Have we written a new story since the 1994 elections?
As in Robertson, much of life in the rural areas in the Cape winelands has continued as before. I thought in 1994 we would make at least one dramatic new story in the manner that Cuba did, after overthrowing the dictatorship of Batista. They halted all formal education and focused on getting everyone literate in two years.
Central to the achievement of the NDP’s goals of eliminating extreme poverty and reducing inequality is the need to urgently address the issue of land redistribution.
Max du Preez addresses this in “We can learn from Zimbabwe’s now flourishing farms”, an article published in The Mercury on April 30.
Du Preez outlined the surprisingly positive outcomes of the forced land redistribution in Zimbabwe. Although he did not argue for forced redistribution without compensation, his point was that South Africa’s land redistribution must be done faster and on a much larger scale.
His source is a new book, Zimbabwe takes back its land, by Joseph Hanlon, Jeannette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart.
Hanlon is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and has written many books on southern Africa, especially Mozambique. Manjengwa is the deputy director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Zimbabwe and Smart a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
According to the book, agricultural production levels in Zimbabwe are now at the same levels as they were before the forced land redistribution process.
What makes this more impressive is that these increased production levels have been achieved by 245 000 black farmers on the land previously worked by 6 000 white farmers.
Considering South Africa’s huge problems of land hunger and rural unemployment, is it not time that we look at more innovative ways of speeding up land redistribution?
What can we learn from other countries, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique and India?
In India Vinoba Bhave, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, identified the issue of land as crucial and continued after independence on a mission to persuade land owners to donate some of their land to the landless. He took the donated land and gave it to the poor and landless to cultivate.
His meeting with the villagers at Pochampalli opened a new chapter in the history of non-violent struggle. The Harijans of the village told him that they needed 32 hectares of land to make a living. Bhave asked the villagers if they could do something to solve this problem.
To everybody’s surprise, Ram Chandra Reddy, a landlord, got up and showed his willingness to give 40ha of land.
This incident showed a way to solve the problem of the landless. The Bhoodan (Gift of the Land) movement was launched.
Bhave firmly believed: “We must establish the independent power of the people – this is to say, we must demonstrate a power opposed to the power of violence and the power to punish.”
In his campaign, Bhave walked for 13 years throughout India and covered thousands of kilometres, addressed thousands of meetings and mobilised the people, cutting across the barriers of caste, class, language and religion.
The movement rekindled faith in non-violence and human values advocated by Gandhi. It raised important questions about the inequality prevalent in the society.
Bhave regarded the power of the people as superior to the power of the state. Many of his ideas remain relevant and inspiring in strife-torn modern times.