African National Congress leader of the opposition in the Western Cape Legislature Cameron Dugmore said on Monday that the party aims to ensure that land audit, land identification and a release strategy are included within municipalities’ integrated development plans (IDPs) in the province before the municipal budgets are adopted in July this year.

Dugmore was speaking to Polity.org about the ANC’s campaign for local social compacts on the land issue in the province. He said there was a great need for land in the province for human settlements, urban agriculture and socioeconomic development, especially local economic development, as well as for recreation.

He explained that one of the challenges the province was faced with was that few municipalities had consolidated and accessible audits of all the land within its districts and whether it belonged to the municipality, provincial government, national government or State-owned enterprises.

Dugmore said he was in the process of writing to all 30 mayors across the province, requesting a meeting to discuss the state of their land audits.

“The idea is that when we get to the adoption of the municipalities’ budgets in July, which is when all the municipalities have to adopt budgets, we want to include land audits and the plan for the release of that land into theIDP which has to be adopted before the budgets can be passed,” he explained.

He said the ANC believed it would be able to involve communities and establish social compacts between communities that need land and the local municipality that establishes emerging agriculture and business.

He explained that the Western Cape had more than 500 000 people on the waiting list for land. He added that by releasing more land, giving security of tenure and by giving title deeds wealth and assets of the most poor in the province could increase.

He stressed the importance of municipalities to look at well-located private land.

LAND OWNERSHIP

Dugmore noted that in the Western Cape, the patterns of urban land ownership are racially skewed in the extreme, with white South Africans owning 70.7% of land, Coloured people owning 10.7%, Indians owning 8% and Africans owning 3.5% of land.

He noted that it was only in the Western Cape and Northern Cape that, in regard to urban land ownership, the historically white population owned the majority of urban land.

In all other provinces, he said the majority of urban land was owned by the black majority – African, Coloured and Indian.