The land where dreams are made of

In a poignant book about the liberation struggle in South Africa, Two dogs and Freedom, black township school kids wrote about their dreams for their future.

They were touchingly simple. Moagi, an eight-year-old boy, wanted “a wife and children, a boy and a girl, a big house, two dogs and freedom…”

There’s an echo of that in the words of Bheki Mlaudzi, 32, a farm worker – and farm shareholder – at a community land restitution project in Mpumalanga.

The money he gets from working on the banana plantations and the stipend he gets from the Giba Communal Property Association (CPA) has enabled him to build a house.

He is living his dream… with a wife, two children and a positive view of what lies ahead.

The Giba CPA project is a shining example of what can be done to ensure that land restitution – one of the biggest political and social issues in South Africa today – actually succeeds.

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Too many times, communities who were dispossessed of their land during the colonial era and years of apartheid have had viable, successful farming operations turned over to them, only to see them fail.

That has made many people bitter and angry and a handful of crooks, both in communities and in government organs supposed to smooth the land transfer process, very rich.

In turn, those failures have provided ammunition for the critics of land reform, who say it is a threat to the very existence of commercial farming.

Giba CPA rents out its land to a white farming company which, as part of the agreement, gives priority in hiring members or descendants of the original community.

In addition, there is a transfer of skills programme which will, hopefully, provide trained farmers who can work their own land.

Giba shows what can be done.

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