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.
[ii] TA Facebook
Highlights
ReplyDeleteThere is a common understanding that land reform is a failure, that policies and theory are not fitting the reality and that pressure from social movements can be the only way to meet the interests of the poor
Critical issues
• To what extend should civil society be involved in social movements?
• Strengthening smaller efforts of land invasions, strikes, etc. rather than trying to build a national movement
Implications for TA
There is a need to work broader than the existing organisations and to hear the voices from academic researchers more often. We cannot any longer operate in our own vacuum. How will the class interest be challenged and how will we make it clear at spaces like the upcoming land tenure summit that we do not agree with the policies?
Ideas on what next
Protest actions at all the public spaces where policies around land reform are discussed until responses on our demands are given