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Tomorrow is the deadline for public submissions to the Director General of Rural Development and Land Reform on the Draft Green Paper on Land Reform.

I will today be writing to the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, to request an extension of this deadline until government clarifies its position on the communal land tenure system.

Approximately 21 million South Africans live on more than 17 million hectares of communal land, which amounts to around 17% of the country’s total farmland area.

It is untenable that the Green Paper does not currently include a strategy for addressing the communal land rights issue as part of an integrated approach to land reform.

There are a number of reasons why a discussion on the Green Paper cannot proceed in the absence of clarity on the government’s position on this issue:

The department has set up six work groups to address different aspects of the land reform process. The task team on communal land has reportedly not had a single meeting. It thus seems unlikely that government's promised “separate policy articulation” on communal land will emerge anytime soon.
In May 2010 four communities occupying communal land in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and the North West Province approached the Constitutional Court to have the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it undermines security of tenure of those living on communal land. The Act was found to be unconstitutional based on procedural irregularity in the way it was enacted and the Court avoided judgement on the issue of security of tenure. CLARA has thus been nullified, but no alternative policy or legislative frameworks have been forthcoming.
The National Development Plan (NDP) identifies insufficient tenure security for black farmers in communal areas as “the first major risk” to the objective of building “integrated and inclusive” rural economies. It is thus nonsensical to continue with discussions on land reform policy if the major risk to the process is a no-go area in the debate.
Only five percent of agricultural land has been transferred through the land reform process to date. Even if security of tenure is only achieved on 50% of communally owned land, it could potentially represent a 270% improvement in the government’s reform process.

The implementation of an effective land reform and rural development programme is a vital step in fostering redress, and addressing the skewed patterns of land ownership that are a legacy of apartheid.

If government's land reform and rural development programme is to be turned around, its plan of action, starting with the Green Paper, must address the communal land issue.