The department of rural development and land reform describes itself as being in the "vanguard" of improving the lives of local communities by making land available.
The claim is made in court papers in respect of the Smiling Valley informal community close to the national road between East London and King William's Town. The department accuses members of the community of engaging in an illegal land grab, which effectively disadvantages those who have been patiently waiting for land redistribution to happen.
While the department takes exception to Buffalo City Muncipality's un-cooperative (read slapgat) attitude which has meant a 10-year and ongoing wait for progress towards a properly planned and marked out township in the area, it couches its own achievements in less critical language. It states it is "in the vanguard of impacting the lives of various communities by assisting them within available resources to have access to land and to own it".
To be sure, the department's rural development programme is at the heart - actually it is the only part - of government's programme to address poverty, hunger, unemployment and lack of development in the rural areas.
So, land distribution is a significant endeavour and, as part of this plan, government has committed to distributing 4,5 million hectares of land to disadvantaged black South Africans, largely dispossessed under apartheid. This figure includes redistribution of about 30% of the country's commercial farms. Land is earmarked for agricultural purposes and natural resource harvesting, for residential settlement, and for re-establishing cultural linkages or rights to ancestral land.
However, to date the department has re-distributed less than one million hectares to poor people.
A major difficulty with South Africa's post-democracy land policy has been the cost of accessing land on behalf of poor communities. The willing buyer willing seller model has seen government budget up to one billion rand per year to acquire land - a total of R21 billion up to 2020 - but a figure which has proved to be hopelessly inadequate given excessive market prices.
White landowners are not about to engage in massive philanthropic initiatives to give away land to their black countrymen and why would they? Of course, it's also not unfair to state that the vast majority of white South Africans do not in the least appreciate the extent of devastation wrought in their name by the respective apartheid land laws.
Under apartheid, up to 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from land to which they had a historical attachment, if not legal title.
Land reform, especially in rural areas, is critical to South Africa's ability to address issues of poverty and unemployment, through both a subsistence and commercial farming programme, given that the vast majority of poor South Africans - some 70% of people, almost exclusively black - live in rural areas.
The paucity of jobs in urban settings means that much more must be done to attract people to remain in rural areas, rather than join the underclass of unemployed and economically unprotected communities in big cities.
South Africa is a big country, but only a fraction of our country is available for agricultural production, around 14 million hectares, just up to 13.5% of the land mass. An even smaller fraction - about three million hectares - is regarded as naturally highly arable land, with a further 1.3 million hectares under irrigation. These figures translate into 87% of our farmland being owned by 60 000 white farmers, of whom about 20 000 produce the vast bulk of our gross agricultural product. There are some 500 000 peasant farmers in the former bantustans who produce around 5% of our agricultural output, for own consumption.
The challenges of changing this agricultural template are huge.
The democratic government has an almost inherent predisposition to over-stating its development goals beyond what a constrained budget and a recalcitrant bureaucracy can achieve in a 24-hour day. And the department of rural development and land reform is not averse to this tendency, hence the lofty claims in the Smiling Valley case around its mandated role.
The reality is that the department is hamstrung between a number of difficulties, a limited budget, perpetual overstatement of goals and market-based land transfers among them. It must also determine whether its strategy should look to restoring the past or be future-focused on land re-distribution which aids food security and economic development.Then there is also the lack of extension services, especially in respect of marketing. And after all these challenges, water remains the biggest impediment to our ability to provide access to agricultural land.
What the Smiling Valley issue does highlight is that the department - and government in various other departmental or agency guises - sits on vast land holdings. Of course, very little of this is productive farmland. But much more effort must go into creative ways of extracting and using this resource for the benefit of poor communities.
It also points to the need for strong community-based structures which can manage land re-distribution processes in partnership with government.
The land challenge is a huge one for our country. Stuttering efforts at land reform are not helped by the failure of institutions like Buffalo City Municipality to play anything approaching a meaningful role to address historical injustice.
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