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288 Restitution, Agriculture, and Livelihoods National Debates and Case Studies from Limpopo Province Michael A liber, T hemba Maluleke, Mpfariseni Thagwana, and Tshililo Manenzhe Although the main objective of South Africa’s land restitution program has been restorative justice and reconciliation, its rural component has always had a recognized role within a broader rural development strategy. In the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), restitution and redistribution together are identified as “the central and driving force of a programme of rural development,” requiring in equal measure the support one associates with agricultural development (ANC 1994, s2.4.2) The White Paper on South African Land Policy, similarly, speaks of land restitution as part of, rather than separate from, rural development (DLA 1997). For the bullish authors of the RDP, what justified this optimism was the belief that anything replacing the agricultural status quo could only be for the better: “[The improved quality of rural life . . . ] must entail a dramatic land reform programme to transfer land from the inefficient, debt-ridden, ecologically-damaging and white-dominated large farm sector to all those who wish to produce incomes through farming in a more sustainable agricultural system” (ANC 1994, s4.3.8). This statement is buttressed by other Restitution, Agriculture, and Livelihoods: Limpopo Province 289 passages that extol the virtues of small-scale farmers and the massive employment opportunities they represent. However, within ten years this way of thinking had been turned on its head. By 2004, government’s predominant concern had become how to transfer land from white people to black people without damaging commercial agriculture, a trend that has continued to the present. This gradual about-face can be roughly traced through a series of programmatic changes and public statements. For example, from around 2000 the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) became demonstrably more concerned about the economic viability of rural restitution projects, evidenced by the sudden increase in uptake of the Settlement Planning Grant, together with the introduction in that year of the Restitution Discretionary Grant of R3,000 per household. Around 2001–2002, the CRLR set up a central Development Planning and Facilitation Unit, which was replicated in the regional land claims commissioner’s (RLCC’s) offices, and in 2003, a Development Grant was introduced, set at a maximum of 25 percent of the land value. Initially a concern about project sustainability, the approach evolved into a particular interpretation of what was going wrong, which went beyond inadequate funding at project level. Even though there were acknowledgments of the inadequacy of extension support and planning, what is remarkable about public statements by senior politicians and officials from around 2002 is that they lay most of the responsibility for the economic shortcomings of land restitution at the feet of the beneficiaries themselves. In her budget vote speech in April 2003, Thoko Didiza, the minister of agriculture and land affairs, declared: “It is important for us also to highlight the fact that new challenges have emerged as we proceed with the implementation of the Restitution Programme. One of these challenges is a lack of capacity among the beneficiary communities to effectively manage the projects that they have taken over, where some of the legal entities that have been established—such as the communal property associations—are finding it difficult to maintain the projects as viable going concerns” (Didiza 2003). Shortly afterward the CRLR’s Annual Report expressed the same idea by way of a pseudohistorical explanation: “The most regrettable effect of apartheid spatial planning is that previously highly productive victims of racial land dispossession were either forced onto uneconomic pieces of land . . . in the homeland areas, or to townships as job seekers. In this process, the victims lost their agricultural skills. The challenge is to identify the skill and to revive the interest in agriculture” (CRLR 2004, 5). Although 290 Michael Aliber, Themba Maluleke, Mpfariseni Thagwana, and Tshililo Manenzhe one does not want to take the textual analysis of public utterances too far, what is interesting about these statements is the contrast they suggest between “viable going concerns” on the one hand, and “uneconomic pieces of land” on the other. Increasingly the former referred, first and foremost, to large-scale commercial agriculture, far from the vision of peasant farmers conjured by the RDP. The reason for this about-face is partly related to the lackluster performance of land restitution projects to date. But it is also found in the tone of defiant defensiveness...

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