An increasing number of voices are calling for the sacking of South African Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs (DLA) Minister Lulu Xingwana and her bungling of the country’s so-called “land reform” project which has, for the first time in its modern history, turned South Africa from a net food exporter to a food importer.
“Land reform” in South Africa means taking already-productive farms and giving them to people who, in the majority of cases, preside over their collapse. The long-standing policy differs from the legalized theft attempted by this year’s failed passage of the Expropriation Bill.
Instead of halting what is an abject policy failure, Minister Xingwana brought in a management company – a “strategic partner” – which was to salvage the collapsed farms and “bring agriculture back to productivity”. The “strategic partner”, SA Farm Management, has now been placed in liquidation, owing more than R100 million to the banks.
Additionally, SA Farm Management created a marketing company to sell the harvests from the farms it was managing. Profits from the harvests allegedly never came back to the farms for re-investment. This money is allegedly also gone.
This scandal follows the looting of the Land Bank, South Africa’s leading financier of agriculture. In addition to losing R41 million in a bungled rate swap, its annual report revealed massive losses due to fraud, wasteful expenditure and crony lending practices, resulting in losses of more than R1 billion.
The DLA is a shambles: a recent audit tabled in Parliament revealed there was no evidence to account for grant commitments of R455 million, interest earnings of R13 million, livestock of R14,5 million and other assets worth R1,15 billion.
Critics of DLA policy forsaw these problems as the policies were implemented. In his book The Great South African Land Scandal, Philip du Toit predicted far-reaching problems with the DLA “solution”, which applied a short-term palliative in an industry which thinks and acts long term.
Leading South African business newspaper Business Day wrote last August that “the more the (DLA) policies fail, the more resolutely the government applies itself to make them work It is a well-known measure of madness.” The publication has also called for her resignation.
A United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported in October this year that SA government market-driven reforms introduced since 1994 had “severely hampered farm output in sub-Saharan Africa”.
Minister Xingwana “continues to destroy commercial agriculture and if left unchecked, could cause South Africa great harm,” says the Transvaal Agricultural Union. “Food riots in an already unstable South Africa will not enhance the SA government’s chances of attracting investment to a country already saddled with one of the highest crime rates in the world, high unemployment, millions of illegal immigrants roaming the streets and a crumbling municipal infrastructure.”
Private consumer groups are considering to haul the DLA and its erratic minister before the Constitutional Court on the basis of Clause 27 (1) (b) and Clause 27 (2) of the SA Constitution’s Bill of Rights. These read that “everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water” and “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights”.
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