More than 26 million hectares, a third of all agricultural land held by white commercial farmers in the country, will be transferred to black farmers by 2015, by expropriation where necessary, the department of land affairs, said on Friday.
In a pointed response intended to dampen fears of rising popular support for Zimbabwean land grabs, the department has gone on the offensive to reassure the landless that the land redistribution process is working in South Africa.
This week the Communal Lands Rights Bill was tabled in parliament by the minister of agriculture, Thoko Didiza, after eight years in the making. It seeks to give full ownership and security of tenure of communal lands to the people who occupy it.
Communal lands have been held in trust by traditional leaders, churches or white commercial farmers. Giving communities legal powers to either administer the land on their own or in collaboration with traditional leaders will loosen the hold trustees have over rural people.
Gilingwe Mayende, the director-general of land affairs, reiterated on Friday that the government would neither lead nor tolerate extra-legal land grabs.
"Although the threat of land invasions will always be there for as long as there is a sense in some sections of our society that the process is moving too slowly, and that they have suffered too long and therefore they are justified to take matters into their own hands, the government E is not going to lead a land grabbing exercise.
"For us it is Bredell and not Zimbabwe that signals the possibility of a red flag."
He said while property rights were protected in the constitution, these had to be weighed against economic equity and the government's commitment to land reform.
"To say that our process is based on a 'willing buyer, willing seller' (approach) is actually a fallacy. It is based on a proactive land acquisition strategy which starts with a negotiated process and can culminate with expropriation," he said.
Mayende said claims by the government's critics that it was using the rule of law - the right to have one's case heard and to be treated fairly by the state - to perpetuate the land rights of propertied classes was misplaced.
The department was unravelling systemic inefficiencies and blockages like long project cycles and cumbersome procedures to speed up redistribution of land following the Bredell land invasions, he said.
Mayende said that in the eight months to March this year when the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development was introduced after the Bredell invasions in August 2001, 157 280ha amounting to 164 farms were delivered by the department.
"This is unprecedented in the restitution programme because for the first time since 1994, we spent 94 percent of our budget, this compares favourably with all the other years before 2000 when this department repeatedly underspent, averaging between 55 percent and 60 percent." - Johannesburg