Land reform issue the elephant in the room

South Africa cannot put off the land issue any longer.

Picture: Gallo Images

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was 74 in 1998 when the Zimbabwean land grabs were effected after Zimbabwe’s British colonisers had washed their hands off any responsibility towards financing land reform in Zimbabwe. President Jacob Zuma is 74 now and was apparently the biggest proponent of land expropriation without compensation in the ANC’s latest NEC meeting.

Apparently he went as far as reminding the NEC that it was their 2012 Mangaung’s resolution, it wasn’t anything new. I’m not suggesting that 74 is the age at which wayward presidents seek to salvage some positive legacy, it’s probably a coincidence.

What is curious, though, is that 2012 is five years ago, and he waited until the ruling party had a breakaway in the form of the EFF based on exactly the principle he’s championing now, and, more curiously, he waited until the ruling party’s support is at its lowest before invoking “expropriation without compensation”. Not very different from Mugabe’s own position when he effected those land changes.

AfriForum recently won a court order barring Julius Malema from making any illegal utterances with regards to land. This is seemingly unrelated to President Jacob Zuma’s stance at the NEC but a discerning observer would note that Zuma and Malema are talking about the same issue which, if carried out to their wishes, would yield exactly the same result.

South Africa cannot put off the land issue any longer. We cannot allow it to continue to fester unattended in the background in the hope that it will somehow go away.

A president who has for years gotten himself entangled in all sorts of mischief has now seen fit to use that issue to sanitise whatever is left of his legacy. By allowing him to champion this issue while everyone keeps quiet, the country is allowing him a certain level of legitimacy.

The reason the land issue is so emotive in our political discourse is because it represents dispossession to both sides of the political equation.

On the one side it represents the worst fears coming to pass, the majority of the country laying claim to their hard-earned inheritance, finally proving that “their sense of entitlement is real”. On the other side of the equation it represents the reclaiming of their dignity, finally banishing centuries of dispossession and being able to say to themselves, too, “South Africa our land”.

Those are two positions that cannot be reconciled by court orders that AfriForum seems really fond of, but it is also not a situation that can be resolved by an out-of-favour president seeking to salvage a piece of history for himself by suddenly becoming a land hero.

It’s a situation that requires sober-minded individuals, who have the best interests of South Africa at heart, coming together to work out a solution that will be historically acceptable to all the citizens of our land.

The fear of dispossession cannot be allowed to override the continued feeling of historical dispossession that the rest of the country feels.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, land expropriation without compensation is hardly the solution to South Africa’s mammoth economic inequalities problems. But as long as we continue to allow it to be the unacknowledged elephant in the room, it will always stand a chance of being hijacked by all and sundry and used in the whipping up of emotions in the battle for votes.

The ball is in our collective court, let’s act.