Durban — Legal and political analysts said King Misuzulu kaZwelithini must reshape and reposition the Ingonyama Trust if he wants it to be the vehicle to drive rural development.
In his first speech as the formally recognised Zulu king after receiving a certificate from President Cyril Ramaphosa in Durban on Saturday, the king announced he would use the trust to champion rural development.
He said he endorsed the Trust Rural Development Forum, which was started by his late father King Zwelithini, promising to work with the forum to develop rural communities.
Legal expert advocate Mpumelelo Zikalala and political analyst Professor Bheki Mngomezulu both agreed the trust was still important, and needed reshaping and refocusing to meet the king's objectives.
Zikalala said for the trust to champion rural development, the king must change its current format, where a businessman would buy inkosi a car and then operate in an area without any benefits for the community except for those who will get jobs.
He said the king must consider adopting a business model like in the mining sector, where mine owners are compelled to develop neighbouring communities where they are operating.
The coastal Black Lawyers’ Association chairperson added that businesses operating on the trust's land must either pay levies to the trust or be compelled to deliver services in rural areas, using a reasonable portion of their annual returns.
“What the king has proposed is very important and a good step but he would have to change the current model form of the trust and must be aligned to current systems of land administration. You will recall that a businessman only needed inkosi to access land and will reap millions of rands in benefits but the communities remained poor except the inkosi whom the businessman would have ‘bribed” with a 4X4 van.”
Furthermore, Zikalala said the king must also look at the land tenure issues raised by the Pietermaritzburg High Court, which ruled against turning permission to occupy into lease agreements. The court declared the collection of rent from the people who had started businesses on their ancestral land as unlawful and ordered the trust to pay back all the money collected to the people. The trust has recently failed to overturn the high court ruling after the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed its appeal.
Mngomezulu said the trust was very important but must be reshaped and refocused following the recommendations of former president Kgalema Motlanthe's panel, which called for the disbandment of the trust.
He said the panel was wrong to recommend its disbandment but rather should have proposed amendments to correct wrongs. The politics lecturer at the University of the Western Cape said it would have been wrong to close the trust since it came about as a result of transition talks between the apartheid government and political parties in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, which paved the way for the first democratic elections in 1994.
After an outcry from rural communities over the collection of rents by the trust, which they described as being turned into tenants in their land of their birth, the government appointed Motlanthe’s panel, which recommended the disbandment of the trust.
This irked the late king Zwelithini, who announced he would rather die than allow the expropriation of his land by the government. With the assistance of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution the Rural Women Movement took the trust to court which ruled that the collection of rent was unlawful.
Daily News