Johannesburg - District land committees (DLC) may be established in provinces to manage land reform, Deputy Land Reform Minister Mcebisi Skwatsha said on Monday.
“The National Development Plan introduces the idea of district land committees ... (but) it is not prescriptive in this regard,” he said at the Western Cape Land Reform Summit in Stellenbosch, according to a copy of his speech.
“For us, land reform success is not just about the number of hectares of land transferred to previously landless and property-less people, but also the extent to which this contributes to job creation and poverty alleviation.”
Skwatsha said the department's original plan was to pilot the DLCs in a few districts of some provinces.
“However the Minmec (ministers and members of executive council) meeting held in August decided that all provinces should begin to form these committees.”
Skwatsha said the key issue with the committees was representivity and the ability to get all parties together to identify land, allocate it for redistribution, and ensure it became productive.
“Buy-in will be crucial to our success. So we also need to see how groups which are largely marginalised in the rural economy are brought into the centre of the land reform program,” he said.
“This must include workers on farms, organised or not, women, existing black small farmers, and the youth. If they are not part of the process and do not benefit from the reform process they can become a threat to the land reform program they are meant to benefit from.”
Sapa