Land affairs must increase capacity to use funds, says Plaas
September 7, 2008
By Wiseman Khuzwayo
Johannesburg - The department of land affairs will have to increase its institutional capacity if it hopes to spend the extra R75 billion it has requested to meet the government's 2014 land redistribution target.
This is according to Ben Cousins, the director of the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape's school of government.
"It's not just money but also skills that are badly needed. Money in itself will not help without a review," Cousins said. "They need to translate the land redistribution programme into practical implementation in the light of policy directions."
The government's land reform programme is carried out by the statutory Commission on Restitution and Land Rights.
Last week Plaas published a review of the land reform programme up to 2008. It notes that lack of skills, and inability to spend allocated funds, have been repeatedly offered as reasons for underperformance by provincial offices of the department of land affairs and provincial departments of agriculture.
In its annual report for 2007/08, the restitution commission noted the lack of skills in the programme. It said it had successfully implemented the staff retention strategy in line with the approval received from the department of public service and administration.
The majority of its contract staff members had been converted to permanent employment in the department and seconded to the commission until all land restitution claims had been finalised.
"The implementation of the strategy will contribute towards attaining stability in our human capital as well as retaining the necessary skills needed to implement the land reform programme," it said.
The department of land affairs, in a request to the national treasury this week, said it needed R75 billion over the next five years to finance the land redistribution programme to reach the target of placing 30 percent of farmland in the hands of black people by 2014.
So far, only 4 percent of land has been redistributed.
To add to the woes of the department, the portfolio committee on public works has put on hold until further notice the controversial Land Expropriation Bill. Committee chairman Thandi Tobias-Popokolo said the decision was taken because of a lack of proper consultation.
The government had hoped to fast-track land redistribution by means of this law.
Land affairs director-general Thozi Gwanya explained the need for the R75 billion for the programme by saying that between R25 billion and R28 billion was expected to be spent on land reform by 2014 in terms of current budgetary projections. He indicated that current and projected spending constituted about a quarter of the department's needs.
The commission's 2007/08 expenditure was R3.6 billion, up 36 percent on the previous year.
Gwanya said there was an urgent need to find the money in the state coffers to fund land reform. If the process continued at the current rate, the 30 percent target would be achieved only in 2025.
The Plaas report says that since its inception in 1994, the programme has been criticised for failing to reach its targets or deliver on the objectives of historical redress, redistribution of wealth and economic growth.
Despite much political hand-wringing and some direction shifts, it says, the policy fundamentals have remained largely unchanged from the formula that was put in place at the time of the transition to democracy.
"Of particular interest, therefore, is not so much the chronic underperformance of a policy area that many saw as critical to post-apartheid transformation, but the ability of the government to persist for so long with an approach that enjoys so little popular support and is clearly failing to deliver on its ostensible objectives," the report notes.
It says payment of "market-related" prices for land - or the "willing seller, willing buyer" approach - remains the norm despite much (but largely unsubstantiated) official complaint about exorbitant land prices.
However, the report adds, the concept of proactive land acquisition has introduced a vital modification to the long-standing "demand-led" orientation of willing seller, willing buyer in that it no longer places responsibility on would-be beneficiaries to identify land for purchase or to initiate negotiations with the landowner.
"Furthermore, it allows department officials to purchase land as it comes on to the market, even if no specific beneficiaries have yet been identified, and allows land owners to initiate transactions by offering land for sale directly to the state, something not tolerated under the previous approach.
"Effectively unchanged, however, is the veto offered to landowners over transactions - that is, in the absence of expropriation, landowners still decide which land will be available for redistribution and retain the power to block any transaction," says the report.
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