An audit and analysis of landownership conducted by Agri Development Solutions (ADS) in cooperation with three stakeholders Landbouweekblad, Landbou.com and Agri SA, aimed at shedding light on the controversial issue of landownership from 1994 to 2016, used data from the South African National Deeds Office.
The most significant finding of the independent land audit is that commercial agricultural land owned by white farmers decreased from 67 percent of the total surface area of South Africa in 1993 to 55 percent in 2016. But this figure excludes the vast areas of the former Bantustans, where land is still owned by blacks exclusively.
Last year already, non-whites owned only a third of the agricultural land value in the country and almost half of all the high-potential agricultural land, amounting to some 46,5 percent. If the former black homelands and traditional black fiefdoms were to be included, blacks instead of whites would probably own 80 percent of all land.
In 1994, whites owned 85,1 percent of all agricultural land. By 2016, it had decreased to 73,3 percent while non-whites now own 26,7 percent. Notably, the 26,7 percent, includes almost half of the country’s best, i.e. high-potential, and very costly agricultural land.
Moreover, in the mainly black provinces of Kwazulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo, more than 50 percent of the land value not included in the former Bantustans, already belong to blacks.
The worrisome finding of the audit is that thus far the ANC government has mainly used land which was already in its possession in 1994, for land reform purposes, suggesting that “land restitution” was in fact a lucrative corruption scheme. The Minister’s report on the official national audit which has been promised for the beginning of this week, has not yet been released.
“What makes this [independent] audit especially valuable is the fact that we can compare it to the government’s so as to ensure that the true facts regarding landownership are laid on the table,” Pieter Groenewald, Freedom Front party leader noted.
Getting to the bottom of land ownership in South Africa is not easy, as statistics are incomplete and, despite a state land audit, little is known about the racial make-up of land ownership in the country.
While an audit conducted last year by the department of rural development and land reform showed that 79 percent of the country’s land may still be in private hands, it did not reveal whether those hands were black or white.
Annelize Crosby of agricultural industry association AgriSA has pointed out that national statistics on the number of commercial black farmers were simply not available. The KwaZulu-Natal agricultural union’s research shows that 46.29 percent of land in the province is fully black owned and 2.3 percent is partially black owned. According to their statistics, only 15.6 percent of land is white owned and the ownership of about 35.8 percent of the province’s land is unknown.
These statistics include land in the former Bantustan of KwaZulu, which is 100 percent black owned.
The ANC goverment – including traditional authorities – owns half of the land in KwaZulu-Natal, while the department of rural development and land reform estimates that the state owns 845 084ha in the Free State, or 7 percent of all land in the small dry province.
Some 91 percent of all land in the Free State province is privately owned. However, the Free State’s former Bantustan of QwaQwa was not included in the farmland audit.
