The ANC’s planned constitutional amendment will not make ‘one iota of difference’ to fixing the land shambles, according to one of SA’s leading experts on land reform. ‘I am not interested in whether the Constitution changes,’ said Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. This was because section 25 of the Constitution already gave the government a mandate for transformation, but it had set out to achieve the opposite.

‘The pace of land redistribution has declined from about 0.5m hectares per year at its zenith in 2007/8 to one-tenth of that in 2015/16,’ Hall said, according to a Times Select report. ‘This has nothing to do with the Constitution; it has been a political choice to dismantle land reform over the past 10 years.’

Hall said the 1994 ANC government promised to redistribute 30% of commercial farmland during its first term, but managed just 1%. Even now, the most optimistic estimates were that 9.7% had been acquired and redistributed. ‘There has been no national monitoring programme to say what the outcomes have been ... but we know that many of those getting land have been unable to use it effectively to improve their lives,’ said Hall. This was also the government’s fault: it had imposed inappropriate business models on beneficiaries and failed to support them.

Full Times Select report