Of the rural poor, women are the most vulnerable; they are the first to loose their jobs, they receive lower wages than men, and they are increasingly reduced to contract, casual and seasonal labour with no security of income as farmers are trying to increase their profits. They are often the victims of extreme violence and sexual abuse. At the same time the overwhelmingly white farm owners pay scant attention to legislation enacted to provide some protection to farm dwellers, women and children.

The South African land reform programs promised to address this rural poverty and inequality, yet has completely failed to realise the RDP commitments and with it the majority of the rural poor.

The RDP state;

Despite these RDP objectives, to date less than 3% of agricultural land has changed hands and a minority of white commercial farmers and agricultural enterprises continue to own the bulk of productive land. The government, instead of revising its failing policies, have revised its RDP targets and now hope to realise the transfer of 30% of land by 2015, twenty-one years after the first democratic elections! To realise this the government will have to distribute the same amount of land every year as they have done for the whole of the last eight years. This is not likely to happen under its current market driven policies.

The low priority government have placed on land reform can be seen in its budget allocations for land reform. Thus far, the highest levels of funds allocated for land reform had only reached 0.5% of the national budget, completely insufficient to realise its targets. Researchers have estimated that in some areas budget allocations will have to increase five-fold while in the Western Cape it needs to increase an astronomical thirty times to realise the 2015 target! This is caused partly speculation and inflated prices in the land market as some farmers hope to make exorbitant profits from the government willing-buyer willing-seller land reform policy.

In the light of this obvious crisis in delivery, instead of greater intervention by the state, recent policy shifts increases reliance on the market. The LARD and the Agri-Black Economic Empowerment plans will benefit a much smaller number and more affluent middle class and elite amongst the blacks. These policy shifts have already given rise to a creeping marginalisation of women as beneficiaries of land reform. The ratio of government financial support favours those with more resources, this deepen the rural inequality with the poor getting less support from the state, likely to end on small patches of land while a new black agricultural elite with more access to resources and capital will acquire large tracts of land.

Black Economic Empowerment in general has thus far only benefited an elite, and the so-called broad based BEE merely hope that through some ‘trickle down’ effect the poor will benefit. The Agri-BEE is no different and will also require enormous investment from private capital; this will reduce the number of beneficiaries from the rural poor and increasingly entrench middle class and small black elite as the main beneficiaries of the government new policies. The Agri-BEE will effectively exclude the bulk of the rural poor and keeping farm labour trapped in virtual slave conditions on white commercial farms, while excess labour will be driven of farms into squatter camps without any services on the outskirts of towns and cities everywhere.

This new class of black commercial farmers that the government hope to cultivate will shortly realise that under the World Trade Organisation trade rules, the decline of government support for agriculture and increased international competition they are not likely to survive. The WTO rules and the insistence of liberalisation of the agricultural economy have throughout the world failed to secure food sovereignty and food security, promoting export driven agriculture. It drive small-scale farmers into increasing indebtedness and bankruptcy, destroy diversity of crops and force poor economies into mono-culture agricultural activities, erode worker rights and the protection of farm dwellers human rights and forcing more and more people dependent on rural economies into unemployment with little prospect of getting work elsewhere.

Under the willing-seller willing-buyer approach it is more likely that less productive and less successful white commercially marginal farms will release their farms for acquisition for the land reform program.

Other aspects of land reform to ensure sustainable livelihoods for the rural population like the protection of workers and human rights of farm dwellers and the privileging of women are hardly adhered to. While the provision of services like education, health, infrastructure and other services are provided by the government only to those who can afford to pay for it.

In the end the real beneficiaries from the government land reform policies has and will continue to be the less successful white commercial farmers.

The concerns expressed by the ANC in the 1992 "Ready To Govern" document that ‘a market driven land reform program could aggravate inequalities’ are now being realised.

The ANC-led government has ignored its own warnings subjecting the process to the market. There has been no change in land ownership patterns and now we have reached the point that Ramaphosa called, ‘the totally unacceptable continuation of apartheid’ in the rural areas.

This has been the verdict of the government land reform policies by researchers, land sector NGOs, civil society organisations, land activists and growing mass social movements engaging in struggle since the late 1990s. Such has been the spectacular failure of the government land reform program over the last ten years, yet government pursue with the same failed policies.

The NLC is committed to:

The NLC network has been in the forefront of struggles against forced removals throughout the 1980s, providing legal support, raising awareness and assisting in organising rural communities. It actively struggled against the apartheid regime’s measures that were hoping to keep the rural black population in subjugation to serve the labour needs of white capital, industry, agriculture and households.

Govan Mbeki in his book, The Peasants Revolt, captured the views of politicians and business interests at the time. A member of the Chamber of Mines stated in the 1940s, "If you pay the Native more wages, or if you give them more land, he is going to stay at home. He is not going to work in the mines". A Senator at another time declared, "The intention was not to give land to the Natives ... Let me say immediately that there is lots of room for those people on the farms. There is a serious shortage of labour on the farms." Senator Basner captured the policy of the regime at the time, "The Native must not get enough land on which he could become a settled peasant. He must get only enough land to place his family, but he must go out to work." These were the policies that prevailed under Apartheid and underpin today’s inequality and land alienation. Despite the political changes ushered in since the beginning of the 1990s the conditions of the rural population are not very different from that described by white interests under the previous regime.

The NLC network throughout the 1980s played an important role in drawing the struggles of rural communities into the general political struggle for liberation. In the 1990s the NLC became an important voice for shaping and influencing land reform policies of the government. This they did in pursuance of transformation in rural areas that will address racially skewed property relations – the relationship of ownership, control and access to land – that underpin the marginalisation of the rural poor, extreme exploitation of rural population, extreme violence especially against women, disregard for culture and tradition and the general dehumanisation and trampling upon the human rights and dignity of the rural population.

Over the last eight years; despite all the advocacy and lobbying, despite the promises made by political parties and the ANC in particular, despite legislative reforms, millions of the landless and farm dwellers find themselves in a situation as virtually as vulnerable as during the apartheid regime.

The government policies cast in a neo-liberal mould privileges the wealthy, and in the case of land reform, capitalist and white agriculture. This has given the NLC network and many landless and farm dwellers no alternative but to often enter into an adversarial relationship with the government to challenge obviously failing land reform policies.

With market driven land reform policies it is the powerful, those with land and capital, that have greater impact on influencing policies. It is the views and interests of white agriculture that have more influence on government policies than the needs of the rural poor, the landless or land sector civil society organisations. Appealing to ‘new patriotism that should be fostered the government is at pains to appease white organised agriculture, while threatening the landless with the full might of the law.

In its resistance to land reform and transforming Apartheid land ownership patterns white farmers; raise the spectre of Zimbabwe style land occupation, claim land reform is a threat to reconciliation, insist on a willing-buyer willing-seller principle, vehemently protest against expropriation – even with compensation, brazenly claim their ownership of land as legitimate based on the brutal history of colonial conquest, they raise the danger to food insecurity if farms are handed over to black farmers and often warn of the implications for foreign investment if land reform don’t proceed along World Bank and neo-liberal dictates.

As the white farmers kick and scream in resistance to land reform the government pander to their tantrums replying; ‘those who want to occupy land will be met by the full might of the law, we will not tolerate a Zimbabwe situation in South Africa, the principle of willing-buyer willing-seller remain government policy, expropriation will only be a last option and with compensation, nationalisation is not government or ANC policy, property rights are protected by the constitution’ and so forth and so forth. And the interests of white agriculture articulated since the 1940s remain in tact.

So when the landless occupy land, protest against government policy and demand a Land Summit, they are assaulted by white farmers, arrested and charged by the police and ignored by the government.

It is out of this experience; from being in the forefront of the struggles against apartheid in many rural areas since the 1980s to being in the forefront of lobbying the new democratic government since the early 1990s, that the NLC today find itself once again in the forefront to take up and actively campaign for what the apartheid regime have refused us and what the new democratic government has failed to deliver – LAND! It is from this experience and the reality of many communities throughout the country that we have declared the "Reclaim Our Land" campaign.

Farm dwellers have always found themselves as part of the poorest, most isolated and most vulnerable sections of society. Of the 13.7 million people living in abject poverty in the country more than half trapped in rural areas as farm dwellers. Some earning still as little as R350 per month with many depending on social grants and remittances from urban based worker relatives for their survival. Thousands have been evicted from farms while those still living on farms are constantly facing the threat of eviction. Their rights are abused with impunity; they are subjected to daily violence and brutality while the judicial system fails them.

Farm dwellers still live under slave-like conditions. They still work up to thirteen hours per day. Women work with their youngest children strapped on their backs, those who are six years old take care of the younger ones while others as young as nine will be found in the fields or the farmer’s kitchen working hours as long as the adults. Often they work six days a week, with neither overtime, nor paid public holidays being observed by the farmer. Sick workers don’t receive medical care instead they are being accused of laziness and threatened with violence, dismissal and eviction. Monthly wages is still as low as R350 per month. Labour tenants are expected to give more and more of their time to work for the farmer while the area they can cultivate, the area for grazing and the number of livestock they can keep are constantly reduced, failing which, they are threatened with evictions.

Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been an explosion in evictions of farm dwellers, in many parts of the country the rapid growth of squatter camps are often linked to farm evictions. In some small towns, old men and women are regularly brought to the edge of towns and dropped on the side of the road with their meagre possessions. Indeed, many are still treated like a ‘pariah in the land of their birth’, aimlessly drifting around settling on the edges of towns hoping for ‘a better life’.

For many farm dwellers the democratic order has often meant harsher conditions as many white farmers vindictively increased their brutality, sometimes as revenge because of the political defeat of apartheid, sometimes out of fear and in anticipation of the implementation of various land reform related legislation at other times simply because of an ingrained racism integral to rural life.

It is only when a farm worker gets fed to lions after assault, when a youth gets fed to the crocodiles, when a child are painted or when a ‘trespassers’ walking through the farm gets killed by farmers taking pot shots at them, when a baby on the back of young child are shot and killed while walking home through a farm, when a farm worker are dragged behind the ‘bakkie’ for more than six kilometres to his death, it is only then that the extreme violence farm dwellers are subjected to are brought to the attention of the world, and sometimes prosecution takes place. But is merely the tip of the daily brutality and dehumanisation faced by farm dwellers.

The low-level structural violence that is the fate of farm dwellers everyday goes unnoticed. What about the farm dweller who have her house and property burnt down to force her to leave the farm, the farm worker who is beaten up by a group of farmers and private security – some allegedly coming from the notorious Battalion 32 of the old SADF, or the farm worker who is beaten with his pensioner mother and young children, the farm dweller who are stripped naked, shocked on his genitals with cattle-prodders and thrown into the farm dam and forced under water, or the farm worker who gets smacked in her face with the flat side of the knife when asking a question, the farm dweller who gets threatened at gun point as she refuses to leave the farm, the farm dweller who gets evicted with the help from local white police, the farm dweller whose statements are not taken by police, whose charges are dropped by the prosecutor because of insufficient evidence despite permanent disability as a result of assault, the farm dweller who are told by the white magistrate to ‘shut up’ when enquiring why his is not afforded legal representation or the farm worker who regularly gets raped by the farmer and then gets chased of the farm by the farmers wife when she become pregnant and point out the farmer as the father. Such is some of the findings of research by human rights, legal, NGOs and other organisations.

New legislation that protects farmer dwellers are not enforced or monitored and rely on the ‘goodwill’ of the farmer to adhere to it. Thus the farm dweller remains at the mercy of the farmer where the slave master relationship is still played out daily. And the farm owner is still white. Farm dwellers find their rights violated and their dignity trampled on every day and this will remain so until the power relations derived from property relations – land ownership, access, control and rights – on which this brutal, inhuman and racist practices are addressed. Farm dwellers remain marginalised, not even reaping the limited benefits gained democratic changes others celebrate. They still have to be freed, and this cannot happen in the framework of the current land reform programs.

"Whoever own the land, owns the buildings on the land as is in effect the master or mistress of the people on the land." Was the warning in 1993 and still persist today.

In society women and children are always the first casualties of bad policies and often the last beneficiaries of better polices, the position of the women trapped in rural areas and on farms are no different. On the farms women are the first to be placed on short-time, reduced to casual and seasonal workers as farmers try and cut costs while competing in an increasing competitive agricultural world market. The levels of unemployment amongst women are higher than that of men and in rural areas it is estimated to be higher than 60%. Their work are regarded as less skilled than that of men, they are not considered as breadwinners or equal to men and therefore receive lower wages. Even where they do the same work as men they still earn less than men, because they are women! Human Rights Watch in a recent study showed this discrepancy in wages where in one instance the males earned R325 per month and the women only got paid R250. On average women earn between 72% and 85% of what men earn, and in some instances it is as low as 57% of the male workers’ income.

Women workers on farms have no childcare support and still have the burden of housework at the end of a twelve-hour or more working day. Women also experience a bias against them in access to skills, education and training. This makes them less employable elsewhere and further tie them to the farm and thus have to tolerate the abuses of the farmer.

Men and women often want land for different reasons, men for profit women to live on the land have access to services like health, education, transport, shops etc. these are factors that are not sufficiently considered in the land reform programs and are slowly eroded with the shift in policies towards LARD and Agri-BEE as well as the Communal Land Rights Act. Women are also more vulnerable when it comes to their homes, often when the man gets dismissed the whole family get evicted. Sometimes when they only perform seasonal work they find themselves of the farm and without a home.

Over and above the discrimination in working conditions and tenure women find themselves as care givers, health workers, and educators of the family in the absence of these services being provided. Even in cases where these services are provided, it will still fall on the women because of the attitude of farmers when workers get ill or injured, or where children are driven on to the farm to work instead of being sent to school.

In the absence of access to electricity and running water in the house the burden as everywhere else fall on the women to collect wood for fuel or draw water of household use. Thus where men might work twelve hours for the farmer, the women often has to put in a further four to five hours of work at home, unpaid. Women are literally still the drawers of water and hewers of wood!

The worst and often most hidden abuse women face is relentless sexual harassment, abuse, rape and violence at the hands of the farm owners as well as from fellow farmer workers. Often these women have little choice, for they have nowhere to turn to, they need the house on the farm to raise her kids, they need the job from the abusive farmer to earn their meagre wages and often they need the husband to stay in the house and to supplement their little wages. They need the job because they have very little education or skill to leave and compete for work elsewhere in a situation with such high levels of unemployment as we have today. Many of the abuses suffered by women go unreported because of this extreme vulnerability. With the HIV/Aids pandemic it make the position of women more precarious.

While the DLA has adopted a Gender Policy, it is not adhered to and does not go far enough to either protect women or give them sufficient access to land redistribution projects. The shift in government policies to LARD, have already seen a decline in women beneficiaries, despite policy commitment. In fact with the commitment to focus on creating black commercial farmers through the Agri BEE and LARD, female beneficiaries will decline.

Women are the backbone of the rural economy and yet still find themselves living at the mercy of the white farmer and black farm worker and are likely to be the biggest losers in the government land reform program despite the gender policies and various other laws in place today to protect women.

The Land Restitution Act was passed in 1994 with the objective to return land confiscated under the previous regime after 1913. This was welcomed and seen as a significant attempt to address some of the historical injustices of dispossession. Though it has not been without its problems and has not been very successful in returning land to the dispossessed, mainly opting for financial compensation, leaving the land in the hands of the whites.

Thus far the restitution program has mainly dealt with urban claims and favoured financial compensation over the transfer of land. To date more than 60% of restitution claims has been resolved while less than 3% of land was transferred in the total land reform program. It is estimated that only about 5% land will transfer hands at the conclusion of the restitution process.

The government has hardly addressed the rural claims where focus is for the return to land instead of financial compensation. The reason for this delay is two-fold; firstly there has been resistance and open refusal buy white farmers to co-operate with the land claims process and secondly the cost of compensation is much greater than what the government has hitherto budgeted for. Even with restitution the government, where they have to buy the land back from white farmers are paying current market and often inflated prices, for land that was given to these white farmers for next to nothing and with extensive support form the previous state.

The Presidential injunction to resolve all restitution claims by the end of December 2005, while welcoming will not be realised and some in government have already warned that it might need at least two more years.

The way out of this for the government is to expropriate the land and where compensation is given it should not be tied to current market prices, but rather take into account all the support, subsidies and protection to white farmers provided by the previous regime. A formula that factor this in will mean that the government will have to spend much less on buying back land stolen from the blacks of the country.

Over the last few years we have witnessed and increase in transforming productive land into tourist destinations and places of leisure for the rich. Game farms, golf-estates and private beaches are mushrooming all over the country, while there is a dire need to release land for sustainable livelihoods for the rural poor. The Agri-BEE will further facilitate this trend, as it appears to be a lucrative business for profits. Already we have a booming real estate market with some international estate agents peddling land on the international market.

We have already seen hundreds of game farms springing up throughout the country. In the Eastern Cape alone the game farms as grown from zero in 1992 to more than two hundred today. Similarly many beaches where families have been visiting for generations are inaccessible to them today.

The other flourishing business in land is the establishing of golf estates, instead of productive agricultural activities. None of these benefit the poor and the landless, while at the same time it is a drain on accessible land for land reform.

Stop the Pirvatisation of Land!

Government Land Reform Program has proven to be flawed. The social cost on the rural poor has been adverse. It is time to develop new agrarian reform policies that will benefit the rural poor, the landless and the farm dweller. Reform program should ensure the transfer of land to the poor, effective post-settlement support, protection of workers, special institutions to protect women’s rights, free services including access to health, education and skills training, water and electricity and investment in infrastructure as well as the program to provide jobs in rural areas.

The failure of the government land reform and rural development program is a sad indictment of its claim to ‘create a better life for all’.

It is time to act! Reclaim our land!