Misplaced Agrarianization?: Reflections on Ten Years of Land Restitution

Cherryl Walker Misplaced Agrarianization? Reflections on Ten Years of Land Restitution INTRODUCTION: TAKING STOCK TH E R ESTITU TIO N OF LAND RIG H TS ACT WAS THE FIR ST PIECE OF transformative legislation to be passed—amid a standing ovation—by South Africa’s newly democratized Parliament in November 1994. Redressing the massive land dispossessions suffered by black South Africans under white minority rule and protecting established (white) property rights were major points of tension during the constitutional negotiations, leading to a compromise that endeavored, judiciously, to provide for both. In terms of this, people who had been dispossessed of land rights after the passage ofthe Natives Land Act in 1913, as a result of racially discriminatory laws and practices, could lodge claims for restitu­ tion. This restitution could take the form of restoration of the original land, provision of alternative land or other state benefits, or payment of financial compensation.1The postapartheid state undertook to negotiate appropriate settlements and to pay “just and equitable” compensation to current landowners if their land was to be acquired for restoration purposes.2The public was given until December 31,1998, to lodge their claims with a Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (or, as it is more popularly known, the Land Claims Commission), which was established in early 1995 to investigate and manage the settlement of claims. According to the most recent government statistics, nearly 80,000 claims were lodged by the cutoff date, over three-quarters of them relatsocial research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 647 ing to urban dispossessions. Although, as discussed later, the number of claims falls far short of what was potentially possible in light of the population relocation policies of the twentieth century, nevertheless the restitution program represents an ambitious attempt to institute a broad but bounded mechanism of redress for the land dispossessions of the relatively recent past. While South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has received considerable attention internationally, its land claims process has enjoyed a much lowerprofile.Yet, arguably, itis equally deserving of attention, given the number of beneficiaries it has reached and the significance of land as an economic and social resource—as well as a source of conflict—in southern Africa and elsewhere. The year 2005 is thus an appropriate juncture at which to take stock of this program. Not only is it the tenth anniversary of the Land Claims Commission. It is also the year that President Mbeki identified in his “State of the Nation” address of 2002 as the final year for the program: a crunch year, by the end ofwhich all outstanding land claims were to be settled and the program declared formally closed. As several analysts anticipated, the advice on which President Thabo Mbeki based his 2002 projections has proved unreliable, and in February 2005 Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza quietly acknowledged that “it will take an additional two years to redress the injustices of land seized under apart­ heid” (SAPA, 2005); the commission is now working to a new deadline of March 31, 2008 (Commission, 2005, slide 2). Nevertheless, the rate at which land claims are being processed has speeded up emphatically in recent years, while the considerable boost to the restitution allocation in the 2005-2006 national budget confirms that the Mbeki government is determined to wrap up the program as quickly as possible. By early 2005 almost 75 percent of the claims lodged with the commission were reported as settled; as a result, and in contrast to its beleaguered status in earlier years, when claim settlements were few and far between, restitution currently enjoys something of the status of flagship in the state’s larger land reform program, which encompasses land redistri­ bution and tenure reform as well and is under sustained criticism for its slow pace of “delivery.”3 648 social research At the same time, tensions arising from a growing gap between ideal and practice within the restitution program are becoming more public. One intriguing illustration is the unhappiness voiced inthe media in February 2005 by the South African National Parks authority about the threat posed to its conservation mandate by 37 unresolved and hith­ erto unpublicized claims on the Kruger...