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According to AfriForum’s spokesperson on the economy, Cornelius Jansen van Rensburg, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform should carry the blame for the tensions over land ownership. This comes after Minister Gugile Nkwinti on Tuesday expressed concern about land ownership in South Africa at a business breakfast in Johannesburg.

Inadequate land policies, corrupt and incompetent officials in the Department of Land Reform, and a culture of blame shifting should be seen as the source of the current frustration regarding land ownership in South Africa. According to Jansen van Rensburg, the minister again blames the past without taking current facts into consideration.

According to Nkwinti, everything in South Africa could fall apart if the land issue was not resolved. ‘With such statements government is trying to intimidate land owners. Nkwinti was insinuating that land grabs and attacks on citizens of the country could become inevitable if land owners did not relinquish some of their property rights. Government has a duty to protect all of its citizens, including land owners, against “things falling apart”. If government was not going to do so, then it should say so unequivocally,’ Jansen van Rensburg said.

The 1994 agreements guaranteed every individual’s right to private property. Any person can obtain land on the free market, but it seems increasingly as if the ANC government seeks justification for the expropriation of land without compensation.
For the past 20 years, the ANC and the government (the biggest landowner) have been using land ownership as a political football to spawn racial division. The view that only black communities can historically lay claim property rights in South Africa is wrong. The propaganda that white people have stolen all of these communities’ land is also false, and a balanced picture should be given of historical land ownership in South Africa.