The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has recommended 42 people, including government officials, be prosecuted for fraud and corruption in the land reform programme. In what is described as corruption ‘on an enormous scale’ it was found state functionaries handed out farms and millions in grants to beneficiaries who did not qualify.

Business Day says it obtained the report this week through a Promotion to Access to Information application. The SIU, which handed its report to President Cyril Ramaphosa in March 2018, investigated 148 land reform projects between 2011 and 2017, finding ‘major systemic weaknesses’ and an alarming absence of controls and mechanisms to prevent fraud and maladministration.

The lack of controls ‘opened the door for ... fraudulent activities on an enormous scale with vast implications in terms of irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure ultimately at the cost of the taxpayer’, the report says.

Most of the cases investigated occurred under the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development Programme in which grants were made available to beneficiaries to cover the costs of the acquisition of agricultural land. Crucially, beneficiaries were expected to stay and work on the farms they were given grants to purchase, often as part of large community trusts, as a way of partially paying back the money they had received. But, according to the SIU, this is not what happened in a quarter of the land reform projects it investigated.

The SIU details how, in many instances, thousands of alleged beneficiaries ‘were not even aware of the project and had never been to the farm’, had never lived or worked on a farm and did not qualify for grants. The programme has since been suspended and replaced by the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy sub-programme, which, instead of using grants to enable black people to own land, entails the government taking over ownership of the land and then leasing it to beneficiaries ‘with the eventual goal of purchasing it themselves’.

But, notes the Business Day report, the SIU has warned that the systemic weaknesses it had identified including ‘vagueness on critical issues’ in land reform policy and failure to follow proper procedure still needed to be addressed. The probe was initiated by a proclamation by former President Jacob Zuma in 2011.

Full Business Day report (subscription needed)

As a result of the evidence, 24 farms worth more than R382m have already been forfeited to the state, notes a report in The Herald. The Asset Forfeiture Unit has also won orders to freeze seven other farms, valued at R82m, pending the outcome of applications for their permanent forfeiture.

While the SIU recommended that the Rural Development and Land Reform Department take disciplinary action against 37 officials for alleged misconduct, the department has yet to respond to requests for confirmation that this has happened. The SIU report found the greatest level of alleged corruption and irregularity in KZN – with 23 farms valued at R354m being permanently seized there alone.

Full report in The Herald (subscription needed)