COSATU statement on centenary of Natives Land Act of 1913

Most centenaries, like that of the African National Congress last year, are cause for much celebration and pride. Today however, we mark a centenary which gives us absolutely no cause to celebrate. The Natives Land Act, passed on 19 June 1913 was one of the worst crimes ever committed against the people of South Africa.

It laid the foundations of racial segregation and apartheid and was a traumatic experience for those affected. At the stroke of a pen, the majority of the population were cruelly robbed of their land, the source of their food and the site of their families' homes for generations. Thousands were evicted and many died.

The Act restricted African land ownership to "scheduled areas" the bulk of which were the "tribal reserves", which represented only about 7.3% of the total land area of South Africa. After the full implementation of the new law, the white minority occupied 87% of the land while the black majority was left with only 13%.

The status of most African people started to change from being independent producers to wage-labourers, especially in the rapidly expanding mining industry. Others became domestic servants or were forced to work for white farmers, even on the very land that used to be theirs.

The Act was immediately resisted by the year-old South African Native National Congress who travelled to the United Kingdom to present their case to the King and the British public. Not surprisingly their pleas fell on deaf ears, since then main driving force behind the Act was the British colonial regime and the business interests it represented.

They desperately wanted to force the African people into wage-slavery in order to maximise their profits from the mines, factories and farms. The forced removals from agricultural land left African people with little alternative but to work as cheap labour for the colonial masters and to live in filthy flee-ridden single-sex hostels.

As the "tribal reserves" became over-populated, more and more people were forced to leave the rural areas to search for job opportunities. As additional "incentives", the regime brought in taxes which could only be paid if you earned a wage.

As President Jacob Zuma said in his State of the Nation Address in February 2013, the 1913 Act turned "black people into wanderers, labourers and pariahs in their own land." It set the stage of the next 80 years of ruthless exploitation and persecution of the black African majority by colonialist, capitalists and racists.

When the National Party took control in 1948, it passed more laws to consolidate the process started in 1913 - the Group Areas Act of 1950, Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951, Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952, Bantu Education Act of 1953, Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, Natives Resettlement Act of 1954, Natives (Prohibition of Interdicts) Act of 1956, Extension of University Education Act of 1959, Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959, Urban Bantu Councils Act of 1961, and the Bantu Homelands Citizens Act of 1970, all targeted the Black working class in its entirety in order to keep it subservient, super-exploited and subjugated.

Since 1994 all this should have become history. We have adopted a constitution which declared that:

• A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure or to comparable redress.
• A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress.
• No provision of this section may impede the state from taking legislative and other measures to achieve land, water and related reform, in order to redress the results of past racial discrimination...

The Restitution of Land Rights Act was passed to give effect to these provisions, and some limited progress has been made. Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti told parliament in February 2013 that 4 813 farms, covering 4.123-million hectares and benefiting 230 886 persons, were transferred to black people through various redistribution programmes, from 1994 until 2013.

But overall, land redistribution has been moving at a snail's pace. Shortly after 1994, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) set a target of 25 million hectares, representing 30% of agricultural land, for transfer to Africans within the first five years of the land redistribution programme, but to date only about 7% - 5-6 million hectares of land - has been transferred to land claimants and land reform beneficiaries and most of the land distributed is not being used productively.

And most of this was state land and not really part of the 25 million hectares originally envisaged. Only about 2.5 million hectares of private land has been transferred, 10% of the original goal.

In response to this clear problem, the Department of Rural Development's White Paper on Rural Development and Land Reform concedes that "the tenure issues of millions of South Africans living and working on farms, and in communal areas and small rural towns remain a challenge for government".

And, in his State of the Nation Address (SoNA) President had to admit that "we will not be able to meet our redistribution targets". The government's response has been to table the 2013 Expropriation Bill, which, as President Zuma said in his SONA, is to enable us to move away from "willing buyer, willing seller" principle.

This has always been a massive stumbling block to progress, as it always left the seller in the driving seat, since he/she could demand the "market" price, which was often out of the reach of the claimant.

This is to be replaced with the principle of "just and equitable" compensation. The big problem with this well-intentioned legislation is that a clause in Section 25(2) (b) replaces the market as the final arbiter on compensation with the courts. We do not believe that an untransformed judiciary can be relied on to give a fair interpretation of what is meant by ‘just and equitable' compensation.

One consequence of the slow pace of land reform is the continuation of apartheid-era labour relations on the farms, which were brought into sharp focus when workers struck and demonstrated for a living wage in December last year. Still today many employers are refusing to pay the new, still very low, minimum wage of R105 a day, and threatening to fire workers who demand their rightful payment.

Another ongoing problem is the insecurity of workers and their families who live on their employer's land. The loss of a job often means then loss of a home. That is why COSATU backs the call by NUMSA and FAWU for a review of the following pieces of legislation, which government passed to try to give security of tenure to labour tenants and farm workers: 

• Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act 3 of 1996,
• Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997 (ESTA) and
• Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act 19 of 1998.

Despite their good intentions, since these laws came into effect, huge numbers of labour tenants and farm dwellers have still been evicted. Between 1995 and 2004, over two million black people left white farms where they lived; about 930,000 were evicted and the principal reason for evictions was loss of farm employment.

This peaked in 1997, when the government passed the ESTA, and in 2003, when a minimum wage for farm workers was introduced.

Given the failure of these Acts the federation supports the call for a review so as to find a way to make them enforceable. 

Another obstacle to meeting the government's targets on land redistribution through existing policy measures is the high level of monopolisation that characterise the agricultural sector, which places small independent farmers at a big disadvantage.

Agricultural production is concentrated in a few big, predominantly white commercial farmers, together with grain storage, food processing and packaging companies, and the massive retail monopolies. There are similar high levels of concentration in the manufacture and supply of inputs such as fertilizer.

Conglomerates also play a dominant role in sub-sectors such as fish and fish products; fruit and vegetables; oil and fats; dairy products; bakery and confectionary; milled grain products; and animal feed. The five biggest companies take more than half of the sub-sector's turnover. Multinational corporations such as Nestle, Unilever, Dole, Parmalat and McCain are very dominant.

FAWU and NUMSA have launched an excellent three month-long campaign on land reform, which will begin with a National Day of Action tomorrow, 19 June 2013 (See details below), building up to a ‘mock referendum' in September 2013 where they will ask members to vote on whether the property clause in the constitution should be repealed or not. They hope this will build a momentum for the campaign and show that our demands resonate amongst our members.

As we mark the centenary of one of the darkest days in our national history we should rededicate ourselves to the struggle to advance national democratic revolution by implementing the historic statement in the Freedom Charter, that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it" and that "The land shall be shared among those who work it!"

Statement issued by Patrick Craven, COSATU national spokesperson, June 19 2013

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