JOHANNESBURG—Dries Marais gazed over his golden fields on his farm in the South African province of North West, corn glittering in the aftermath of a heavy thunderstorm.
In guttural Afrikaans, the 62-year-old said, “When many of my friends and relatives left South Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s, I stayed.
“I told my sons, ‘We are connected to this soil. Our Boer ancestors fought for our place on this land. We fought the British, and then we fought the ANC [African National Congress].’ The world says we lost those wars. But here we still are.”
Marais’s face is lined, but his eyes are those of a much younger man, a steely, piercing navy blue, and his thick, freckled forearms are as brown as the ground his boots crunched into.
When South Africa’s last white president, F.W. de Klerk, released ANC leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison in early 1990, following decades of apartheid, whites feared a vengeful black population would drive them from their homes and land.
According to opposition party the Freedom Front Plus (FF Plus), 20,000 white farmers—respected internationally for their ability to produce food not just for their water-scarce, arid home country but for millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa—have emigrated since the mid-1990s.
“They’ve been driven out because 30 years into so-called democracy, they still get told that they’re European foreigners and don’t belong in the only land they have ever known,” Wouter Wessels, a member of parliament for the FF Plus, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“People still sing so-called liberation songs calling for them to be killed, and the court says it’s freedom of speech. They leave because they continue to be attacked on their farms, their children murdered and wives raped.”
Marais said some of his friends are now highly successful grain farmers across the border in Botswana and Zambia, and especially in Russia and Ukraine.
“Do you believe me when I say they would rather stay in Ukraine right now than to return to South Africa?“ Marais said. ”They tell me, ‘The war here is going to end soon and then the world is going to need even more wheat. When will your war end?’”
Marais scoffed, saying, “I can’t imagine myself farming in Ukraine or anywhere else. This land has been in my family for generations. We are Africans.”
But now, something’s happened that’s making him “have second thoughts” about the future, he said.
A few weeks ago, the ANC used its majority to push the Land Expropriation Bill through parliament, amid objections from opposition parties.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to sign it into law in early 2023.
The bill allows the state to seize land for “public purpose” and in the “public interest,” without compensating owners. The ANC insists it will limit itself to “mostly” seizing abandoned land, property owned by “slumlords,” and “land held for speculative purposes and not put to good use.”
But some agricultural unions and opposition parties suspect that the ANC plans to use the bill to confiscate white-owned land, in what would be a populist move ahead of elections in 2024.
“When the bill becomes law, what’s to stop the government from deciding that taking a white farmer’s land is in the public interest, and then doling it out to supporters?” Wessels asked.
The bill follows almost three decades of failed land reform by the ANC.
When the ANC has purchased land from white farmers at market-related prices and given it to black agriculturalists, most subsequent farming operations have failed; in many cases, not because the black farmers lacked the skill to farm, but because the government didn’t keep promises to support the farmers with subsidies. Much of the land now lies fallow.
Massive state-run agricultural projects have also been wracked with corruption, with billions of dollars meant for “black farmer upliftment” still unaccounted for.
Ramaphosa told parliament that “grave mistakes in land reform” had been made, insisting that the Land Expropriation Bill would “right the past wrongs.”
Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Patricia de Lille told The Epoch Times: “Expropriation of property with nil compensation isn’t a silver bullet. Expropriation is only one acquisition mechanism that, in appropriate cases, for public interest, will enable land reform and redress.”
Her ANC colleague in parliament Nolitha Ntobongwana told The Epoch Times that the bill is “very progressive. ... It will give land back to people who were forced off land during apartheid. It will bring dignity back to the people.”
But Samantha Graham-Mare, member of Parliament for main opposition party the Democratic Alliance, told The Epoch Times that the ANC is “telling lies.”
“This Expropriation Bill will not be used for land reform. It’s a tool to punish private property owners. The ANC wants to use it to cover up its own failures. It has no interest in redressing past land injustices. Its only interest is in accumulating wealth for itself,” Graham-Mare said.
Ultra-leftist party the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) criticized the bill for being “too limited” and “pandering to the interests of white capitalists.”
“So now the ANC want to give unproductive land to black people, in other words, the scraps that whites don’t want. Once again, with this bill, the ANC has shown it’s in bed with white landowners and white capital,” EFF leader Julius Malema told The Epoch Times.
One of South Africa’s foremost land reform experts, Professor Ruth Hall of the agrarian studies department at the University of the Western Cape, told The Epoch Times that the latest bill represented a “significant backtracking” on the part of the ANC.
“Earlier drafts of the bill were much more overt with regard to the possibility of the state seizing land without compensating owners. Subsequent revisions of the bill still leave that door open, but only a crack,” she said.
“Right now, it’s unclear how it’s going to be used, and politically, the ANC has chosen not to say when it wants to push for no compensation and when it doesn’t.
“And I think one of the reasons why nobody’s terribly thrilled about this bill, on either the left or right, is that it doesn’t resolve this question.”
Hall said the ANC has been very careful to not allude to the expropriation of farmland in the reworked bill.
“I think there’s a deliberate misreading, particularly by supporters of the Democratic Alliance, to say that in the 1990s there was an agreement that there would always be compensation paid for land, and that isn’t the case,” she said.
“The constitution never said there must always be compensation, and it never said it should be at market price.”
Hall said the government has actually seized a lot of land over the years.
“If we look at the kind of land politics and conflict in the country, we see that a lot of it actually relates to situations where rural people are being expropriated,” she said.
“These are black communities who do get expropriated by the state without compensation, but they don’t have private ownership rights; they have customary rights and informal rights.”
So the government has always had the power to take private land without compensating legal owners but hasn’t used it, according to Hall.
“The question now is, will there be a moment in the near future when the ANC decides it’s in its political interests to seize a white-owned farm?” she said.
Wessels says that possibility looms large.
“The ANC is panicking; it knows it’s on course to lose the election in 2024. Even its own leaders are saying so, publicly,” he said.
“The more radical elements in the ANC are putting great pressure on Ramaphosa to deliver something tangible to the masses in 2023, something that will tilt them back into the arms of the party.”
