Mernat Mafirakurewa
Johannesburg - South Africa plans to transfer at least 30 percent of land to black owners, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform Gugile Nkwinti said on Tuesday.
Nkwinti said government was already behind its target of transferring 30 percent of the land by 2014 as only five percent has so far been re-distributed.
He said lack of adequate finances to buy land to redistribute to landless blacks was one of the reasons stalling progress.
Nkwinti told Business Day that at least R71-billion is needed to buy outstanding land by 2014, but Treasury had asked the department to revise its request of an additional R18-billion over three years to a more realistic sum.
“We remain obsessed with 30 percent. The issue has a great potential for polarisation,” Nkwinti told a media briefing.
He said his ministry was yet to make formal pronouncements regarding the shift in the deadline to 2025.
After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the government set itself a target of handing 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.
The minister reiterated that the state's "willing buyer, willing seller" model of land reform did not work.
However opposition party, the Democratic Alliance believe farms that had already been redistributed are failing and falling into ruin because the beneficiaries have little or no interest in agriculture.
"Eighty percent of the people [given farms] just wanted land," DA rural development and land-reform spokesperson Annette Steyn said.
Last month the DA launched a report titled, "Land Reform in Crisis" highlighting the findings of visits by MPs to a number of farms that were redistributed in terms of government's Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme.
Oversight visits were made to 11 farms in Limpopo, five in the Free State, and two each in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga.
According to the report, a total of 2 864 farms have been redistributed for agricultural purposes nationally.
"Of those reviewed, 29 percent have failed, and productivity at a further 22 percent is declining. Should those in the latter category also fail, more than half of farms redistributed by government will have failed," the DA said in the report.
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