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Land Commissioner contradicts Minister of Land Reform over existence of land claims database
Land Reform is being hampered by department's apparent inability to accurately record or report its own information
Latest incident part of long of history of contradictions from department





A spirit of disingenuousness and misinformation continues to thrive in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Following last week's debacle, in which contradictory reports were issued about the resignation of the Director General - first he did not, then he did - this week it was reported that the Deputy chief land claims commissioner, Sibusiso Gamede, admitted to farmers at a meeting in Kwa Zulu Natal that the department did not know how many land claims had been settled nor how many were still outstanding.

As seems to be increasingly the case, however, soemone else in the department has an entirely different story: when I asked the minister earlier this year how the department mointored claims, he stated that his department kept a consolidated land claims database.

This is no small matter. Being able to track claims is critical to the department's ability to be able to properly do its job. The government has set itself targets for the processing of land claims. The lack of a database not only prevents government from measuring its own performance but also prevents it from being able to assess the claims that still need to be addressed thus causing unnecessary stagnation in the pace of land reform.

But it is quite clear the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and so, once again, we are forced to ask, who is telling the truth?

This latest contradiction is just more disturbing proof of chaos in the department. Furthermore, it comes on the back of numerous requests by farmers and claimants to receive a copy of all land claims and the progess thereof. The significance of this is that the ANC government have set themselves the target of transfering 30% of agricultural land by 2014. Yet, they do not seem to have asked how they will be able to measure the progress of their policy if they do not even know how much land has been transfered thus far?

Perhaps Mr. Gamede was not aware of the database the Minister was referring to, which raises the question of how competent he is to do his job. Alternatively, the department does keep such a database but for reasons only known to itself deliberately keeps this information from its land claims commissioners, which could only lead us to ask what the point of such a database in fact is.

Another option, and one given considerable weight after the department's communications fiasco over the DG's resignation, is that there was never in fact any such database. This of course raises serious doubts about the efficacy of the department's ability to implement and monitor its own policy.

This latest admission joins a long list of contradictions from this department not including last week's Director-General debacle:

• The department denied in the first instance that land reform projects had failed only for the Minister to then admit to a 90% failure rate after we submitted our report on farm visits
• The department denied in the first instance that it had outstanding commitments to pay to land owners, only for the Minister to later admit in a written reply that the department has lawsuits pending against it for up to R497 million and an additional R580 million backlog owed to land owners.
• The department denied in the first instance a statement I made drawing attention to the fact that they did not have a full land audit. I was then apologised to in a land reform committee and was given an "amended" reply to indicate that the department have in fact not completed its land audit

I will once again be asking the Minister to clear the fog and provide us all with the most relevant, latest and above all correct information from his department.