Cape Town - Unhappy about the way government was handling land reform, the African Farmers Association of South Africa (Afasa) said it needed to overhaul the process completely.
“Government must either do land reform properly or drop the process completely because in its current form, this process is destroying the very lives of people its supposed to improve,” Afasa Secretary General Aggrey Mahanjana said in a statement.
He described government's approach to land reform as causing beneficiaries a great deal of “pain and misery”.
Mahanjana pointed out people were frustrated at the slow process around land reform and were not receiving enough support from government.
He said, after 22 years of democracy, the progress made had not been enough and a new approach to land reform was needed. Mahanjana said Afasa suggested government should “rather outsource this important task to private companies for implementation in each province”.
Government function should be policy development, monitoring and evaluation, as well as providing resources to the implementing agents of this process.
“Farmers who have been allocated farms through the land reform process are now far worse off than before, living with shattered dreams and an uncertain future,” he explained.
“Many have been allocated unproductive farms which are currently vandalised either by previous owners or ordinary thugs in the nearby communities. Some of these people left their comfortable lives where they worked as teachers, nurses, police and so on with a dream of bettering their lives as farmers and to contribute to the country's food security, economy and create jobs.
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“They are now left out by a corrupt and incompetent system to fend for themselves. Their lives have been destroyed.”
Even farmers eligible for funding from commercial banks or government development finance institutes were finding it difficult to “invest in these farms as they belong to government”.
These farmers, Mahanjana pointed out, were only occupying them through “very strict lease agreements”. He added some farmers, who were brave enough to do something about it, stood to lose this investment “due to the voetstoot [without guarantee or warrantee] government lease agreements”.
“The state will throw a Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) book at you if you dare claim compensation of the investments done on the farm.”
AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY