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Jul 21, 2008:
Land redistribution "should not just be an issue of chasing the percentage", according to Gwede Mantashe, the secretary general of the ANC. He said on Wednesday that the party should not just say we want 30% of the arable land to be distributed by 2014.
"We should be able to say that if land is registered because it is given to those beneficiaries, there must be a programme of enabling those beneficiaries to sustain the level of productivity of that piece of land or improve on it," Mantashe told asset managers of Nehawu Securities, the black-owned stock broking firm owned by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu).
"Because if we don't do that it will be an academic exercise of transferring land from white to black ownership and stop there. We say we can't stop at that level, we should go with a programme that prepares people who were not on that land before to be able to maintain the level of productivity of that land."
This is not, he insisted, to downplay the importance of percentages. "But it won't have much meaning if you distribute the 30%," he said, "but reduce the productive capacity of that land by 90%."
He added: "People must be trained. Don't give them land – sensation, emotionally happy and satisfied. But the production doesn't give you anything in return." By Michael Hamlyn, I-Net Bridge
