Land reform: KZN failures point to difficult road ahead

The combined efforts of the former Departments of Rural Development & Land Reform, Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries and their provincial counterparts over the past five years have failed dismally in facilitating the meaningful development of land reform beneficiaries and emerging farmers in KZN. This, notes Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch, is the gist of a deeply depressing report compiled by the National Assembly’s Agriculture, Land Reform & Rural Development Committee and tabled in the House on Tuesday. It was informed by an oversight visit to the province intended to familiarise committee members with the ‘lived experiences’ of farmer support programme beneficiaries – enabling them to assess the impact of post-settlement and farmer support expenditure since 2014. The visit was arranged in the context of government’s ongoing commitment to accelerated land redistribution and the development of an ‘inclusive agricultural sector’.

The report attributes ‘the collapse of land reform projects’ in the province ‘partly’ to the weakness of ‘institutional mechanisms for co-ordinating interventions’ on the affected farms. As a result, post-settlement and farmer support is not only ‘disjointed’ and ‘piecemeal’; services are often duplicated, with poor financial reporting and a general lack of accountability compounding the problem. However, delving into the system of conditional grants and a plethora of development programmes run by one or other of the recently reconfigured departments, the report uncovers similar issues on an alarming scale. There is apparently a ‘growing trend’ for conditional grants to be used ‘for purposes other than those intended’. Worse still, projects either collapse or are ‘in distress’ while ‘under the management of implementing agents, mentors or strategic partners’.

Agricultural extension support for emerging farmers in general but ‘especially land reform beneficiaries’ is ‘almost non-existent’. Mentorships are inadequately monitored, rarely building capacity and developing skills to the level expected. ‘Strategic partnerships’ – designed to ‘transform power relations and property ownership’ by preparing ‘former farm workers’ to ‘control’ and take ownership of the enterprises concerned – have largely failed. In these situations, the prevailing employer-employee relationship is described as ‘undesirable’. There is no ‘connection’ between the comprehensive rural development programme ‘phase’ of ‘meeting basic needs’ and the ‘enterprise development … and rural industrialisation espoused in the agri-parks’ initiative.

Concerns about ‘the embezzlement of funds’ (and ‘collusion’ between ‘farmers, strategic partners/mentors and projects accountants’ to that end) are especially worrying given that this practice appears to be rife among interventions made under government’s ‘pro-active land acquisition strategy’ and ‘recapitalisation and development programme’. While the report does not explicitly say so, a decision by the former Department of Rural Development & Land Reform to ‘withhold’ allocations under the new ‘blended finance model’ (a combination of grants and loans) may well have been prompted by similar ‘issues’. This is noting that difficulties in accessing credit continue to ‘constrain’ emerging farmers and that blended finance is ‘not suited’ to meeting the needs of small-scale and subsistence farmers. Something is clearly very wrong.