Why Land Reform Matters in South Africa’s Election

For the first time since the end of apartheid in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party is poised to lose its governing majority. While corruption and poverty are often cited for the setback the ANC is expected to face in elections later this month, its electoral fate is also closely tied to its performance on land issues.

Despite the fact that the country has urbanized and its economy no longer revolves around land, delivering land to Black South Africans remains a yardstick against which ANC performance is measured. Land has deep symbolic meaning as an acute material loss before and during the apartheid era and as hope for a more inclusive and just future. As Nelson Mandela put it in 1995, “With freedom and democracy, came restoration of the right to land. And with it the opportunity to address the effects of centuries of dispossession and denial.”

When apartheid rule crumbled in 1994, a small white minority held most of the farmland in the country, while 13 million Blacks, most of whose ancestors had suffered forced removals from their land, were packed into rural settlements at the fringes of the economy that the apartheid regime cynically labeled “homelands.”

That marginalization fueled inequality and deep resentment. Blacks were far removed from the centers of political and economic power, and the lands they were removed to were overcrowded and of poor quality. The incoming ANC vowed to return people to the land that had belonged to them.

The ANC initially promised to reallocate 30 percent of the country’s agricultural land, amounting to about 60 million acres, to redress racially based land dispossession that occurred following the 1913 Natives Land Act. It aimed to fulfill its promise with a land restitution program and a separate land reform program. The land restitution program sought to restore land rights to people who were forcibly removed from their land under racially discriminatory apartheid-era laws and practices.

Victims of land dispossession had to file a restitution claim with the state by the end of 1998 to be eligible to have their land returned or to have access to an alternative remedy. The land reform program entailed the distribution of land to nonwhites as part of reconciliation and reparations that would go beyond specific restitution claims. The goal, essentially, was to transfer land held overwhelmingly by wealthy white landowners to Black farmers.

It is no coincidence that the party retains staunch support in places where it has successfully delivered on its promises. I recently spent time at the site of one of these successes in the country’s northeastern Mpumalanga region. One of the biggest projects of land restitution in the country’s history took place under the Greater Tenbosch claim in Mpumalanga’s Nkomazi municipality.

In the late 2000s, the government transferred over 150,000 acres of land to seven Black communities in Nkomazi, comprising about 20,000 beneficiaries. Much of that land was planted in sugar cane, which required attentive management, capital, and expertise.

The government purchased the land from TSB, now part of RCL Foods, and handed it over to the communities. Several of them, in turn, formed joint partnerships with TSB, leasing the land back out to the company while participating in management and training a new generation of community-based leaders.

It has become a model for partnerships between business and communities that has been replicated in other valuable areas of agricultural production in the country. “It’s so challenging,” one Black farm manager told me, “but it’s so exciting, to work in that place knowing that you are giving something back to the community that raised you.”

Today, Nkomazi remains a bastion of ANC support. The party’s vote share reached an apex of 95 percent in 2009 with the Greater Tenbosch claim settlement, and in the last national elections in 2019 it still towered over its opponents in the district with 83 percent of the vote. Everyone I talked to in the land restitution communities remains supportive of the ANC given its transformational role in the country and could not imagine turning over power to another party.

The ANC reclaimed the Giba community’s ancestral land from white farmers in Mpumalanga province in the early 2000s and turned what was then a productive farm growing bananas, lychees, and macadamia nuts over to the community. It returned to revitalize and invest in the farm in the early 2010s, and it now grows high-value crops while employing women and running a program to train young people in farming.

The Giba Communal Property Association secretary, reflecting on the success of the project, reported, “As land reform beneficiaries, we have been able to establish partnerships that have enabled us to make this land profitable.” As with Nkomazi, election returns dating back to the 2000s show that the local municipality where the Giba community is located strongly turns out for the ANC.

But the ANC has notched more land reform failures than wins, and these failures are hurting it. Broader progress in both the land restitution and land reform programs has hit a thicket of snags. While the government has transferred about 14 million hectares (34 million acres) to Black farmers since the end of apartheid—excluding private purchases, restoring rights through compensation, or land acquisition for non-farm use—this is only about half of the ANC’s initial promise of 60 million acres. The government has pushed back the deadline to finish land transfers several times, and its new goal is to complete the process by 2030. Even that seems impossible at the current pace.

The land restitution claim deadline of 1998 was far too little time for many of the dispossessed to organize and present solid legal claims for restitution. Applying restitution is messy and entails grappling with what are often poorly documented histories and addressing inevitable conflicts between claimants on the same land. The government tried to reopen the claims process in 2014 to the many people who had previously been left out. But the Constitutional Court blocked that move, arguing in part that the government had to clear the remaining nearly 7,000 unresolved claims first. These are especially complex claims, often involving whole communities, and most remain stuck today.

The failure to finish the land returns it had promised decades ago has made the ANC vulnerable to political competitors on both its left and its right. The radical left, gathered most effectively by the Economic Freedom Fighters party, has criticized the ANC as slow, overly bureaucratic, and too accommodating to markets and white business interests.

It is pushing for rapid land returns and wants to accomplish its goal by dropping compensation for expropriated landowners. Meanwhile, the Democratic Alliance, a centrist party that gathers its core support from South Africa’s white minority population, advocates for a land reform process that focuses on business development and food security. It has repeatedly charged the ANC with ineptitude and corruption on land issues.

The financial difficulties and implementation problems in both the land restitution and land reform programs are hard to miss. Purchasing farmland for restitution and land reform at market rates is extremely expensive, slowing the process down and putting a lid on land transfers. The government also initially viewed its job as done after it handed land over to beneficiaries. The lack of comprehensive and sustained support from the government led to a wave of discouraging farm failures.

For example, the country’s first successful post-apartheid land claim, by the Elandskloof community in the Western Cape, buckled without enough capital and state support and has only recently begun to regain some footing. The initially successful Zebediela citrus farm in Limpopo province succumbed to the same fate after years of mismanagement, litigation, and interference. Other projects have underdelivered and faced long delays, like the resettlement of the District Six area of Cape Town that the apartheid government bulldozed to the ground—expelling and relocating its residents to make way for a whites-only area—in the 1960s.

In addition to these larger projects, legions of smaller farmers who received government grants to purchase state-acquired farmland have failed due to poor planning and insufficient post-settlement support. And the government has repeatedly been accused of corruption and double-dealing, doling out land to allies and more well-off individuals rather than the most needy. These failures are particularly galling for the many hardworking South Africans who are struggling to make ends meet, and they fan the flames of opposition to the ANC.

While its handling of land issues is shaking the ANC’s monopoly grip on power, any successor government will face similar challenges and should heed the lessons of recent years: Until the country’s land issue is remedied, it will continue to shape South Africa’s politics and bedevil those who govern the country.