The government has noted it is to seek leave to appeal the landmark ruling forcing it to sell a farm to a 78-year-old land reform beneficiary rather than giving him 30-year lease, says Rapport.

Lawyers for David Rakgase, who has been farming for 28 years on the farm Nooitgedacht near Northam, received the application for leave to appeal on Thursday.

As previously reported, the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) delivered a scathing judgment about the government’s failure’s to properly facilitate land reform. Rakgase successfully argued the government offered to sell him the farm in 2002 and he accepted it in 2003. Rakgase would fund the purchase partly with a land reform subsidy and partly through a loan.

Instead, the state offered him a lease.

Judge Norman Davis held there was a ‘clear breach of the state’s constitutional duties’ in the matter. However, notes Rapport, in the leave to appeal application, the state argues there was no offer to sell and the court placed disproportionate emphasis on the farmer’s age.

The department says the court failed to distinguish between Rakgase’s application for a subsidy and an application to buy the land. He applied for the former, the department alleges. Furthermore, the court failed to identify the constitutional duty that was allegedly breached, the department charges.

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The appeal clearly shows the government’s incoherence and the sharp contradictions that exist in its land policy, notes a Business Day report.

‘Land is an asset that people want to have in their hands so that they can work this asset,’ President Cyril Ramaphosa said in an interview with eNCA in 2018.

‘We’re going to embark on an agricultural revolution that’s going to empower our people to work land effectively.’

But the exact opposite appears to have happened in the case of Rakgase, whose farm was allegedly invaded in 2016 as a direct consequence of the state’s insistence that he continue leasing the land for another 30 years. Rakgase reportedly told Business Day that those who invaded the land were adamant he had no valid claim on it, because he did not own it.

But, in the leave to appeal application, the Department of Land Reform argues that it was only in 2010 that the state’s land disposal committee agreed with the provincial grant committee’s approval of funding for Rakgase to buy his farm.

It insists that the grant committee had no power to approve the actual sale.

It says Davis was incorrect to blame the Minister of Land Reform for the 17-year delay in Rakgase’s application to buy the farm being processed, as he had only received the land disposal committee’s recommendation nine years ago.

Davis said Rakgase’s advanced age justified his decision to order the state to sell him the land now. But the government insists the judge was wrong to reach this conclusion, as other members of Rakgase’s family had applied for grant funding to buy the property and he was ‘not the only possible beneficiary of the farm’.

Full Business Day report