to be a hopeless idealist who doesn’t understand the details. But the status quo is, in fact, what is unsustainable. Rising debt levels, poor throughput, chronic unrest, and skyrocketing fees are the hallmarks of a failed policy.
In the case of free education, as in so many others, we need the bravery to imagine a policy that focuses on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Free tuition would put thousands of rands into the pockets of poor families, and prevent new graduate professionals from having to live lives of debt and financial exclusion. This also relates to race: not only does black tax affect new graduates because of the need to support extended families; it is also worsened by policies that imagine we can overcome inequality through debt. The so-called ‘black middle class’ is really just the ‘black indebted class’, whose freedoms continue to be hampered by an economic worldview that sentences them to decades of privation.
What we must do in South Africa is have the guts to experiment. The old model has been tried for long enough. There may be kinks in the chain, and problems down the road, but the need for change – real change – has never been more apparent. We either trust the status quo and lose the long game, or act decisively despite the short-term uncertainty. Instead of fearing the worst, we should imagine the tremendous benefits of expanding access to higher education and, at last, living up to the ideals of the Freedom Charter.
MYTH THREE:
Land Reform Threatens Stability
Land reform is the road to stability in South Africa, but it is often painted as stability’s biggest threat. As the myth goes, meaningful reform will spark a ‘Zimbabwean-style’ economic crisis. This falsehood leads many South Africans who agree with land reform in principle to disagree with it in practice. We cannot afford this: the most dangerous thing that South Africa can do for its long-term security is to pursue the course it is currently on.
Roots
South African land reform since 1994 has been an enormous failure. 67% of South Africa’s land mass is considered commercial land, most of which is enjoyed by 40 000 commercial farms.69 Although this land accounts for a large proportion of South Africa’s surface area, it only houses about 3% of the population. By contrast, 8% of South Africa is ‘urban land’,70 which includes cities, towns, townships and informal settlements. Although this land accounts for a small amount of total land, it houses most of the population, at 62%. A further 15% of South African land is ‘communal land’ or the former ‘Bantustans’. About 35% of the population occupies such land. The remaining land is state-owned, consisting of government buildings, roads, railways, schools, hospitals, conservation areas, and national parks. So, there are four types of land: commercial land, urban land, communal land, and government land.
In this context, the government’s land reform programme revolves on three often-confused processes: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform.71
Restitution is the easiest to understand. It involves providing compensation to the direct victims of land dispossession. In other words, if person A was forcibly removed from piece of land B, restitution involves returning that specific piece land to that specific person, or their direct descendants. If direct return is impossible or undesirable, then restitution happens through financial compensation.
Redistribution is a similar, but distinct, process. It also relates to land restoration, but it doesn’t require that the beneficiaries be direct casualties of an identifiable act of dispossession. Rather, it focuses on sharing between white and black South Africans. Therefore, restitution and redistribution aim to address two related, but different, injustices: restitution addresses the dispossession of actual people and families, while redistribution attempts to address the structural injustice of racialised land dispossession; one is specific, the other general.
The third, and final, aspect of government’s land reform strategy is tenure reform. This aspect of land reform is neglected but no less crucial. Its roots lie in the criminalisation of black landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, first institutionalised by Cecil Rhodes’ Glen Grey Act of 189472 and later deepened through the Union of South Africa’s Natives Land Act of 1913.73 Both acts stripped black South Africans of the benefits of landownership. Specifically, in areas demarcated as ‘black reserves’, later ‘Bantustans’, black people could occupy, but not own, the land. Thus, they couldn’t enjoy usual landownership rights like the ability to extract rent or use land as collateral. They became landless land-dwellers, and their only two immediate options for economic survival were subsistence farming or exploitative employment in a distant labour market designed for their subjugation – the mines.
This was supposed to change in 1994. In its White Paper on Land Policy of 1997, the South African government promised to resolve the rural tenure issue by restoring land formerly comprising the ‘Bantustans’ to the people who lived on it.74 The White Paper promised that rural land tenure rights would finally change from ‘permit rights’ to ‘ownership rights’. This would have constituted one of the most far-reaching and impactful transfers of wealth in South African history: at once, government would have empowered twenty million South Africans with access to real landownership and the rural poor would be asset owners, counteracting the vice-like grip of the monstrous Rhodesian-apartheid legacy. But, inexplicably, government never followed through.
Failures
Land redistribution is the thorniest of the three pillars of land reform. Like tenure reform and restitution, it has seen false starts and broken promises. In 1997, government’s White Paper on South African Land Policy argued that we could transfer 30% of commercial agricultural land to black South Africans by 2014. To date, long past that deadline, only 6–8% has been transferred. Excuses often given for this dramatic failure are that ‘not all black people want to be farmers’, or that ‘it takes time to train people to use land productively’. This is entirely beside the point and elides a key distinction: you do not need to be a farmer to be a landowner. Commercial agricultural ventures operate at two levels: first, there is the land on which the farm is built; then, there is the business on the land. Therefore, there are actually two assets in one place. It is possible for someone to own land and rent it to a business that uses it. Suggesting that black people need to become farmers to own land is like arguing that they need to become retailers to own property. So, the question of productivity is a non sequitur.
Of course, decolonisation must also happen at the level of the businesses on the land. Here, we should see similar transfers to those envisaged by Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment. The implementation of black empowerment policies has too often led to elite capture. Much more important than a few rich businessmen owning stakes in commercial farms is worker ownership. Instead of seeking external partners, farm-owners should be encouraged to transfer a portion of their businesses to worker-owned and worker-controlled entities.75 Not only would this contribute to land reform, it would also combat economic inequality, and improve agricultural productivity. Farmworkers in South Africa have experienced some of the worst subjugation of all, and their shameful treatment has persisted through democracy. They earn among the lowest minimum wages in the world, lower even than factory workers in China. Transferring ownership of commercial ventures directly to them would be an important material and symbolic move to address the need for a more equal society.
The final aspect of the commercial agricultural picture is worker eviction, still commonplace in South African agriculture. Farmworkers, who already work under reprehensible conditions, are regularly illegally evicted from their workplaces. Government has a responsibility to enforce laws that already exist to protect these workers. Worker ownership would certainly help to avoid this, but more can be done. Government enforcement does not only mean more inspectors and bureaucrats, it also means using the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce the law. Where farmers have unfairly evicted workers, the state should embark on legal action against them, to send a message about the seriousness of the issue. The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform could – and should – have a dedicated litigation wing, which deals with enforcing the expropriation of land, and enforces the law on evictions. Once some farm owners are held accountable for their actions, the message will spread to others, and conformity with the law will become more likely.
Tenure reform is a failure