DA blows the lid on another scandalous Free State land reform project
26 July 2020
The Democratic Alliance (DA) recently carried out an oversight visit to the Maluti Dairy Project in the Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality to assess the current state of the project. What the DA found is a shell of a dairy building, with equipment and infrastructure missing or vandalised.
See photos here, here, here and here.
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In 2011, the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) visited this project that was an initiative of the local municipality based on two state owned farms. The dairy project was clearly doomed from its inception since it was planned that a mere 53 cows would be milked to financially support 97 people.
The Free State Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) spent R860 000 on this farm in the 2006/07 financial year. During the NCOP visit, the project was already static due to borehole blockages, the loss of machinery and a breakdown of relationships among beneficiaries. The cattle were later split up between beneficiaries and the dairy came to a halt.
The Free State DARD indicated to the NCOP that they would supply training, reopen the borehole and use the farm to house cattle for the Diyatalawa Dairy project in the same municipality. After R15 million was spent building the dairy at Diyatalawa, this has also come to a standstill. Both projects are static and while the Maluti Dairy Project is beyond repair, the Diyatalawa Dairy still has some of its equipment.
It is clear that land reform projects, specifically dairy projects, in the Free State have become special vehicles for milking taxpayers and dashing the hopes of better lives for the intended beneficiaries and their families. The Maluti Dairy, Diyatalawa Dairy and Vrede Dairy projects are examples of this.
Land reform continues to fail because of the long outdated and mostly abandoned models of collectivism that are only practised by the ANC government as it attempts to implement its archaic National Democratic Revolution.
These dairy projects also prove that corruption and the lack of management, monitoring, training and other support to beneficiaries remain significant reasons for their failures. Many such derelict projects exist on state owned farms in the Free State and remain relics of government’s failures regarding land reform.
Expropriation without compensation will not remedy this situation, but only serves to risk investment into productive food producing privately-owned commercial farms.
The DA has a sound land reform alternative that promotes partnerships between emerging and commercial farmers, relevant training to beneficiaries of land reform, ownership by beneficiaries and sound agricultural extension support. Our emerging farmers must become viable and sustainable commercial farmers who contribute to job creation and food security.
The ANC-government in the Free State will not rest until the whole Free State is a mirror image of these projects that are milked by cadres, stripped of anything of value, with residents impoverished and all hopes of better lives ploughed into barren soil.
Issued by Roy Jankielsohn, Leader of the Official Opposition in the Free State Legislature, 26 July 2020
