The issue of land owned by a minority which had previously wielded economic power is not unique to Zimbabwe. There are inescapable parallels with neighbouring South Africa where events taking place across the Limpopo are being watched with keen interest. Tom Nevin has been sampling official and public opinion on the issue.

South Africa desperately wants to be a trusted and reliable partner of the international economic community but this ambition will remain a dream as long as issues such as Zimbabwe’s land-grab crisis continue to paint the entire southern African region with the same brush. President Mugabe’s rejection of democracy and the rule of law has caused severe international repercussions, denting confidence in regional economies and raising anxious voices about the direction South Africa’s own land reform programme is taking.

Inevitably, South Africa’s landless are watching events across the Limpopo and will take their lead from what eventually transpires there. The National Land Committee (NLC) has already warned that a South African land crisis is brewing.

Land rights coordinator Andile Mngxitama says it is imperative for South Africa to carry out land redistribution in an orderly and equitable fashion. “But if this question is not resolved, people may consider resorting to the Zimbabwean option.”

After the 1994 election, the new government announced a five-year plan to transfer 30% of agricultural land to indigenous farmers. “To date, less than 2% of that land has been handed over,” reports Mngxitama. Of over 63,000 land claims received so far, just 1,600 have been resolved.

South African agriculture minister Thoko Didiza concedes that land redistribution has lagged expectations and that 80% of land is still controlled or owned by whites. “Less than 13% is controlled by blacks,” he notes, “but this will change once the claims are processed.”

National land claims commissioner Wallace Mgoqi is equally optimistic. “Everything is on track as far as land reforms and claims are concerned,” he says. “This gives us the assurance that the situation in Zimbabwe will not come to South Africa. There is no chance at the moment that violence will erupt.”

Problems similar to Zim

Mngxitama is not so sure. “The problem at the heart of our land reform programme is fundamentally similar to the obstacles plaguing Zimbabwe’s land reform - market based redistribution on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis and the absence of a justice-based reversal of colonial property relations,” he points out. “On the backs of these policies, Zimbabwe’s land reform programme has failed to deliver 20 years after its inception. Here, the same policies have already seen five years of failure. The sharpest evidence of this lies in the fact that while the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme promised to deliver 30% of the land to the landless in the first five years, less than 2% - very little of it high quality agricultural land - has been transferred to date. It is common cause that South Africa’s land reform is in bad shape and producing worrying trends.”

The programme that will reform ownership of South Africa’s land addresses the issue in three parts: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform.

• restitution is designed to redress the legacy of post-1913 forced removals
• redistribution is a ways and means for state-subsidised land transfers to landless people tenure reform intends to strengthen the land rights of farm workers, labour tenants and dwellers on state-owned tribal communal land.

Tough choices lie ahead, “but if South Africa wants to avoid reaching the same destination as Zimbabwe,” Mngxitama insists, “it will have to get off the land reform road it has so far shared with that country.”

The South African rand is to southern Africa what the US dollar is to most other developing regions of the world and international nervousness in the region was evidenced when at end April the currency fell to its lowest ever level of R6,8 against the dollar.

Zimbabwe’s March statistics show that inflation rose increased by 9.2% to 50.8% and could reach 70%, according to Howard Sithole, Harare-based economist for Kingdom Financial Services.

Some South African companies with interests in Zimbabwe have frozen further capital investment there. Sugar giant Tongaat Hulett, Nissan South Africa and Grinaker Construction have all announced freezes. The South African Chamber of Business (Sacob) told its members to be cautious in dealing with Zimbabwe. “The rule of law is not being applied and the risk to business is extremely high,” according to Sacob chief executive, Kevin Wakeford. SA Reserve Bank governor, Tito Mboweni reported negative effects on SA. “You can pick it up on the markets,” he said.

“Southern Africa is, to a large extent, seen by European and American investors as a region, rather than several distinct countries,” says Wakeford. “The whole region will carry the cost if there is an economic meltdown in Zimbabwe.

Inescapable parallels

The parallels of the land issue are hard to ignore. In Zimbabwe, whites - who account for 2% of the population - hold some 70% of the fertile land. In South Africa the 10% white population owns around 80% of the country’s productive land.

Says the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) president Stanley Mogoba: “We can’t be simplistic about what is happening in Zimbabwe, but we must act now or decide whether we want that crisis to happen here as well.”

The opposition Democratic Party (DP) also sees worrying similarities. “We need look no further than the land invasions taking place in Zimbabwe to realise that South Africa could be faced with a similar situation if the government continues to ignore the poverty trap many of our people are caught up in,” says Dan Maluleke, DP spokesman on land issues.

Another opposition party, the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo), says the land seizure in Zimbabwe is a result of Zimbabweans losing patience and it is “only a matter of time before the same thing happens here.”

Azapo national publicity and information secretary Kedibone Molima maintains that the situation exists in South Africa where “even the tinkering with the restitution of land to its rightful owners in terms of the pussy-footing programme of the ANC government is not going anywhere at all. Black people continue to be insulted and humiliated on the farms by whites - being thrown onto the streets, being refused permission to bury their dead where they live and even brutalised or killed.”

According to South African Land Rights Research Programme investigators Shadrack Gutto and Theunis Rouxm, the best way of ensuring long-term respect for property rights may be to enact effective, far-reaching legislation that redistributes those rights in the short term.

“From another perspective, where the existing distribution of land is manifestly unjust, as it is in Zimbabwe, it may be in the owners’ interests to give up some of their resources to preserve the remainder,” say the researchers.

“South Africa needs to learn a lesson here,” they caution. “The way government acts on the constitutional promise of access to land for all needs to be continually reassessed.”

The parallels of the Zimbabwean and South African land issue also occupies the mind of University of South Africa political science lecturer Phil Mtimkulu who points out that South Africans are well aware of the difficulty of moving people from land they have illegally occupied.

“Informal settlements which dot the country’s landscape started through land invasion. Efforts by the government to move the illegal occupiers of land were met with resistance. In a number of cases violence broke out and lives were lost.”

As far as commentator Max du Preez is concerned, there’s a bright side to the turmoil in Zimbabwe - it serves as an early-warning system to South Africans.

“It helps us identify mistakes we should not make,” he says. “It points to areas where we should work harder: even why we should be thankful for the government we have. Land is an equally critical issue in South Africa.

“But unlike Mugabe, who did nothing for 20 years and only woke up to the hunger for land when he needed a political weapon to fight against his political enemies, the ANC government recognised the importance of land distribution early on, and quietly started doing something about it.”

But he considers that the pace of land reform remains too slow. “A larger problem is that there seems to be no plan to alleviate the land hunger of those millions of people living off subsistence farming on communal land,” Du Preez contends.

Black South African sentiment to the Zimbabwe land issue was summed up in the results of an opinion poll in black townships conducted by the Sunday Independent newspaper. Fifty-four per cent supported the Zimbabwe war veterans’ invasion of white land while 48% agreed with the Zimbabwe government’s refusal to stop them.

South Africa is approaching the land issue on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis.

SADC the real victim

In the view of ABN Amro economist Colen Garrow, the rand will continue to weaken unless free and fair elections are held in Zimbabwe resulting in a stronger opposition. Garrow notes in a research report that the knock-on effect of Zimbabwe’s instability is not only tainting South Africa but the danger arises of international money-lenders factoring political risk into their lending rates making offshore borrowings more expensive for countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

And it’s the opinion of Rian le Roux, head of economic research at Old Mutual Asset Management in Johannesburg, that there’s a risk that “Zimbabwe’s problems will become South Africa’s problems,” although the real macro impact is fairly small as just 3% to 4% of SA’s total exports go to its neighbour. However, he says, the “sentiment is very big. It taints the whole region.”

Johannesburg’s Business Report notes that whether South Africa likes it or not, it is seen in a regional context. “Sadly, we know we have more to celebrate than lament,” it says in an editorial. “But the chances of that being broadcast to the international investment community is slim, unless the government and business make a concerted effort to drag the spotlight back to local successes.”

Says The Economist: “If Mr Mugabe continues to override the rule of law in Zimbabwe, the violence will intensify, whites will leave, investment will dry up - and the infection will spread. All Africa’s countries risk some damage, but those who stand to lose the most are those closest by.”

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