Moving Posts #2
This commentary is written following a two-day Conference on agrarian question after twenty years of democracy at the University of Cape Town[i]. I invite you to read my impression of the debate and share your response to the headline above.
We no longer believe that State-driven
land reform is possible. The institutional structures tasked with land and
agrarian reform are unreformed and perpetuate the land-race-gender battle. The
Government will only de-racialize and reform the agrarian structure within a capitalist
trajectory. Market-led land reform has turned into a show of global capitalist
investors of ‘wolves’ dressed as social responsible ‘lambs’.
Two positions were heard on extreme
sides of the land reform and agrarian change continuum. The first scenario
argues the need to reform the agrarian structure and ‘leave the past behind’
for economic purposes. It proposes to invest in 250 000 Black peasants -
commercial smallholder farmers with market access - as sole beneficiaries for
land reform, while offering some production support to the millions of Black food
producers and smallholder farmers. The second
scenario proposes to remove Section 25 from the Constitution and distribute all
land through a simple application process.
Both proposals are extreme not
‘radical’ in its implications. The first scenario prioritizes a particular
group of food producers considered deserving of land. In a way it echoes the
scare tactics of organized White agriculture about food insecurity and loss of
foreign investment, often citing the ‘Zimbabwe nightmare of bad things
happening when Black people own the land’. The second scenario propagates access
to land for all and cutting out the red tape that characterize Government land
reform efforts. Yet it ignores how structural inequality and power
differentials play themselves out in pro-poor access to resources and assets.
The RDP Housing programme is an example of how the better-off benefit from
Government schemes explicitly aimed at the poorer segments of society.
If we believe that people-driven
land reform is the way, we need to tap into and support acts of resistance on
the ground. The experience with the Landless Peoples Movement suggests that our
great expectation of a social movement might look very different from what we
know or expect. Such movements might be more modest and localized, mobilizing
around a critical event in people’s lives.
For members of the LPM in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, the burial of a
farm dweller served as an anchor point for protest action.
Historiographies and heroic
events in the past also inspire today’s struggles. The site of resistance - a
hillside - and songs sung by mineworkers at Marikana seemed to mimic the Mpondo
revolt of the 1940s in the Eastern Cape, where most of the drill operators come
from. The farm workers strikes have
shown that peoples’ struggles can also reproduce and entrench power dynamics
and inequality along race-gender-class-migration-nationality lines.
The approach to land reform in
Zimbabwe was a ‘quick and cheap’ way of dismantling, de-racializing and
democratizing the agrarian structure. Not wanting to downplay the violence and
devastation that occurred, the grassroots agrarian sector in Zimbabwe was able
to bounce back from the economic downturn, international sanctions, and lack of
Government support.
Where does this leave us as civil
society role players and collective? In an open letter the CIVICUS Alliance[iii]
calls on civil society to critically examine their practices. They flag that
the new generation of activists has emerged. They are globally connected, quick
in responding to issues, and criticize the development bureaucracy in which
established NGOs are caught up in.
So enrich the debate and share
your views!
Pietermaritzburg, 22 August 2014
Monique Salomon, coordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya
[i] Scholars
and civil society actors gathered at the University of Cape Town on 14 and 15
Aug to reflect on South Africa’s agrarian questions after twenty years of
democracy. The Conference, hosted by the Centre for African Studies and
Heinrich Boll Stiftung, zoomed in on the mismatch between theory on land and
agrarian and the realities on the ground, the role of the post-apartheid,
neo-liberal state, and the role of civil society in agrarian change. The inputs
of Prof Ben Cousins of PLAAS and MP Andile Mngxitama of the Economic Freedom
Fighters brought the debate to a head.
