Another news article:

South African farmers see barren future with evictions on horizon

The Telegraph

By Stephen Bevan in Ventersdorp, North West Province

He does not look like the leader of a resistance movement. Yet, as one of the first half-dozen white farmers in South Africa to be forced to sell up under its land reform programme, Pieter Jacobs is at the forefront of a battle likely to be as bitterly fought as that in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

For eight years Mr Jacobs, 53, and six neighbouring landowners in the Ventersdorp district of North West Province, have been disputing the claims on their farms by the Bakwena tribe, who say that the land was taken from
them under apartheid laws. Now Mr Jacobs has been told that the farm where he has lived for 30 years must be returned to the Bakwena, a ruling that has profound implications for other white farmers.

He will be paid Ł940,000 for the 5,700-acre farm, but claims that it is worth three times that. His 32 workers and their families will lose their homes and their livelihoods but receive nothing.

"I'm not against land reform but it must be done in a proper way," Mr Jacobs said. "Why force a productive farmer off his land?

"We are being seen as the bad people in South Africa, but if I leave this farm, where are my workers going to live and work? The new owners will have nothing. The government gives them no assistance.

"It's the same as Zimbabwe, only less brutal. At the end of the day the result is the same. They are taking taxpayers' money and buying productive farms to give to people who won't be able to produce on them because they have no training or equipment."

The sudden haste on the part of South Africa's Commission on Restitution of Land Rights is because, more than a decade after the end of the country's apartheid regime, whites still own more than 80 per cent of commercial agricultural land. As part of their attempt to tackle the legacy of apartheid, black South Africans were encouraged to lodge claims for land that they were forced to sell or that was designated as whites-only under the old racial zoning laws.

Of the 9,000 land claims lodged by blacks in rural areas, fewer than 500 have been resolved, prompting the Government to extend the deadline for settling all claims by a further two years to 2007 - to the embarrassment of President Thabo Mbeki, who wants more rapid results.

The slow pace of land reform arouses strong passions among the black majority and has come to symbolise the government's failure to deliver in other areas, such as housing and basic services.

At first it proceeded only where landowners were willing to sell for an agreed price, and expropriation was seen as a last resort - if nothing else, for fear of scaring off foreign investors.

Now, however, the gloves are off. Blessing Mphela, the regional land commissioner for Gauteng and North West Province, announced the country's first expropriation in Lichtenburg three weeks ago, and said that he was preparing to serve notices on another five farms - Mr Jacobs's among them.

Part of Mr Jacobs's opposition no doubt stems from his desire to get the best possible price. He claims that the commission will not pay a fair price for the "improvements" he has made to the land, including two farmhouses and an abattoir that he said would cost Ł2.2 million to replace. Mr Jacobs lives on the farm with his wife, Mariette, and 27-year-old son, also called
Pieter, who would one day have taken over the business.

"Please be fair to me," Mr Jacobs said. "It took me 20 years to build this business, but for the last 10 I've been able to do nothing with it because of the land claim. Now I must start all over again."

There is no disguising the sense of bitterness among these farmers about what they regard as a politically motivated attack upon them. Mr Jacobs and his neighbours say that they have never had a chance to contest the Bakwena claim - and now they never will, because the government has changed the law to enable it to expropriate land without first going to the land claims court.

Like many such claims, the roots of the dispute are murky. According to official records, the land was bought from an Afrikaner farmer in 1880 by the Wesleyan Missionary Society, which leased the land to the Bakwena. When the Church later sold up, it paid the Bakwena compensation for terminating their leases and helped them to buy another farm.

The Bakwena say that they gave money to the Church to buy the land for them and it had to be registered in the Church's name because black people were not allowed to own property in that area.

There are no records of this, they say, precisely because it was designed to circumvent the law.

Mr Mphela says that the farmers had not previously challenged the validity of the Bakwena claim, and accuses them of trying to drag out the negotiations even more.

"They want to refer it to a court because they know that court processes are intractable," he said. "This is an attempt to buy time. But it won't help any of us because the dispossessed communities then think the only option is
land invasions."

Hendrik Viviers and his son, Sarel, who farm about 1,400 acres and are also facing expropriation, believe that they know why the commission won't go to court.

"They knew their case wouldn't stand up so they waited until they changed the law," Sarel said. "Now all we can do is go to court to challenge the price."

Hendrik said: "This was one of the first land claims in South Africa and they want to make an example of us. It's a political issue. Mugabe chased the farmers in Zimbabwe off their land and now Mbeki is doing it too."

Mr Jacobs said that there are other farmers who would be happy to sell. With the price of maize half what it was two years ago, farming is a tough business.

He said that he will not stay in South Africa. "If they take my farm from me I won't buy another here," he said. "What is to say that in another five years they won't take that away from me as well?"

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Note I do NOT post these articles to knock South Africa. Far from it. I post them as I hope awareness internationally may prevent the inevitable.