ANC must make a move on land or face consequences

One of the observations one can make about the ANC in a year when it holds its elective conference is that there will be excess amounts of hypocrisy gushing out from all over the organisation.

Fortunately for the ANC, you can’t overdose on hypocrisy … because that requires a conscience. And nowhere will that hypocrisy be more in evidence than in the posturing around the question of land and its redistribution. That’s because any ANC leader jockeying for position – and even those who aren’t – will blithely ignore the fact that land redistribution has failed not because of the machinations of “white monopoly capital” or racist pushback; it was never done properly in the first place, by the ANC itself.

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It is almost 28 years since this country threw off the shackles of apartheid. It now appears that these were replaced by equally constricting bonds of corruption and incompetence. Had the ANC embarked on a methodical, gradual
campaign of land redistribution – via “willing buyer, willing seller” – many more people would own land now.

And owning land gives people a real opportunity to build themselves the ANC’s promised “better life”. In the cases where land has been acquired and passed on to landless people and communities, there has been an almost 100% failure of the agricultural and other projects started on the properties.

This is because the hapless recipients either were not given proper support by the government, or were ripped off by people from within their communities or by outsiders.

In the latter case, those rip-offs would have been facilitated by the lack of control and supervision by the government. Why, also, has the government not tackled vast tracts of communal land and given those to people, rather than allowing “royalty” to keep people in serfdom? Stop posturing and get moving …