JOHANNESBURG—When President Donald Trump issued an executive order condemning the South African government’s alleged plan to seize white-owned farms, it reignited debate about land reform in Africa’s largest economy.
Commentaries and feature stories often cast white landowners as perpetrators of racism, continuing to farm territory they own by virtue of apartheid and colonialism, while their workers and nearby indigenous black inhabitants, the true owners of the land, live in poverty and squalor.
At the heart of these arguments are a set of ubiquitous statistics apparently showing immensely skewed white ownership of farmland: 36,000 white commercial farmers own more than 80 percent of arable land; blacks own only 4 percent of privately held ground, even though they’re nearly 80 percent of South Africa’s population of 63 million, with whites making up a mere 8 percent.
According to two of South Africa’s foremost land reform experts, however, these numbers are based on flawed analysis.
Under apartheid, blacks had few land rights and were mostly confined to township shacks and smallholder farms in “homelands” that separated different ethnicities.
Whites resided in suburbs and on large farms. Whites in South Africa were privileged then, just like now, and unemployment and poverty statistics support this, says research.
A report by the country’s state-funded Human Rights Commission in 2018 found that just 1 percent of 7.5 million white citizens live in poverty. Some independent civil rights groups have disputed this number, saying up to 12 percent of whites are poor.
Those detractors argued that more than 30 years after the fall of apartheid, South Africa’s white minority remains the most privileged segment of society, despite the ANC’s affirmative action and black economic empowerment policies that were labeled “racist” by Trump and his Pretoria-born adviser, Elon Musk.
Ramaphosa presented the law as vital to achieving the ANC’s 1994 promise to transfer most land to black citizens.
Legal experts told The Epoch Times that, theoretically, the act allows state agencies to confiscate private property should they decide it’s in the “public interest.”
Those legal experts also say that there are many myths about land reform, and that the oft-cited data is based on flawed analysis and that black land ownership is probably three times higher.
Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo, agricultural economists at Stellenbosch University, told The Epoch Times many farms and tracts of land previously owned by whites are already in the possession of blacks.
“It’s a myth that land reform has failed in South Africa,” said Sihlobo. “A detailed reading and analysis of the statistics shows that progress has been much better than journalists, politicians, and activists claim.”
Kirsten and Sihlobo, land reform experts who are challenging the mainstream narrative on the topic, base their research on data from a trove of government records, including property transfers, title deeds, and census figures.
Many media reports said only 8 to 10 percent of farmland has been returned to black South Africans since apartheid ended.
“We still need to go quite some way in achieving true land reform in South Africa,” said Kirsten. “But failure to recognize the gains that have been made means that policies can’t be developed based on what’s been achieved so far.”
Using sources including a population census taken in 2011, the nationwide community survey of 2016, and an agricultural census held in 2017, the researchers calculate that there are 2,600 large-scale commercial farms in South Africa, and most are owned by whites.
“But that’s just the beginning of the story; we have to dig deeper to get to the truth,” said Sihlobo.
The best parameter to use when viewing land ownership in the country, the experts said, is to look at the 242,221 households practicing small-scale commercial agriculture, and to use title deeds and other data to determine how many of them own the land they’re working.
“Using very credible data sources, we calculate that most commercial farm enterprises in South Africa are black-owned, and that only 18 percent are white-owned,” said Sihlobo. “It’s a mistake to say all white commercial farmers are large-scale and that all black farmers are small-scale.”
To state that 36,000 white commercial farmers own more than 80 percent of South Africa’s best agricultural land is also false, said Kirsten.
He explained that in 1994 white farmers owned almost 80 million hectares of freehold land, with this now down to little more than 60 million hectares.
“This follows the implementation of government redistribution and restitution programs and other transfers of land to black farmers. It still represents 78 percent of freehold farmland but covers only 50 percent of the total surface area of South Africa,” said Kirsten.
Sihlobo added: “Seen through an ANC lens this obviously isn’t enough to achieve extensive land reform and it’s obvious more land must pass from white hands into black hands, but things aren’t as bad as people make out. Blacks own a lot of land in South Africa.”
He said it’s also wrong to state that white commercial farmers are hoarding land and not offering it for sale.
Kirsten said deeds records show that since 1994 black South Africans have privately acquired almost 2 million hectares of farmland through self-financed market transactions.
Over the same period, the government redistribution program has helped beneficiaries acquire a total of 7.2 million hectares of farmland, said the researcher.
Because of this, Kirsten said it’s false to say that South Africa has only redistributed 8 percent of farmland to black people since 1994.
Sihlobo said these arguments “ignore the statistics on the land market and the fact that black South Africans have been buying farmland on their own independent of state programs.”
Kirsten said the country would be “far beyond” the 30 percent figure of land now owned by blacks had it not been for successive ANC government’s “bureaucratic inefficiencies, patronage, and corruption” that have slowed land reform.
The incorrect statistics, said the researchers, are being used by parties on the radical left, most notably the Economic Freedom Fighters, to rationalize invasions of white-owned farms, and to use “speech bordering on hate” against white farmers.
“Rule of law is paramount in South Africa,” Nyhontso said. “Going on a state-driven mass land seizure path is silly, for two reasons. One, even if we seize all land owned by white farmers there won’t be enough to achieve true land reform. We have said we intend to expropriate land in a very limited way, and we will pay owners fairly for that land. The [expropriation] act is just one little tool in a big box.
“The second point I must make is that all we have to do is look across our border at what happens when private property and in particular farms are seized by government. It’s economic suicide.”
Kirsten and Sihlobo said that should the state render private property worthless by confiscating land without compensation, owners won’t be able to pay their debts.
“This would cause a financial crisis the likes of which we’ve never seen in South Africa,” said Sihlobo. “This is what happened in Zimbabwe, where land was simply taken and the illegitimate owners didn’t have the skill necessary to produce enough food. That also caused a food crisis and Zimbabwe is still dealing with the consequences today.”
