INLSA

President Jacob Zuma. Picture: Matthew Jordaan

Only days after President Zuma urged extreme caution on the South African land issue, it emerged in Parliament that the officials entrusted with it were not on top of their vital mission.

Zuma had been publicly warning one of his executives, Agriculture Deputy Minister Pieter Mulder, against his poke at the history of the land question. It was one of the most emotive issues in our history, the president said, and had to be “handled with utmost care and not in the careless and callous manner that the honourable Mulder handled it”.

“We urge Mulder to tread very carefully on this matter,” said Zuma. “It is extremely sensitive and, to the majority of people in this country, it is a matter of life and death... I don’t think we should provoke emotions.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth, when the parliamentary committee on public accounts came upon a bombshell: complete disarray in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform.

It had MPs gasping, expressing outrage. They learned that squirming officials had no idea how much land the state owned (part of Mulder’s challenge on the land reform issue), and that they were incapable of basic statistics on land claims so far.

Perhaps, within a week of Zuma declaring that the willing buyer, willing seller programme was not working, he has an explanation for it. Or a partial reason, at least.

It is a charged matter, as Zuma says – emotion heightened by events in neighbouring Zimbabwe. It is astounding, then, that any inefficiency can be tolerated in such a key department. It should be one of our best, as good as our revenue service.

Given the snail’s pace of land reform, mounting impatience, and consequences seen nearby, repair of this department must become a personal Zuma priority.