Those who led southern African states to independence promised to redress the inequalities of settler colonialism by returning the land to the people. A generation later the rural poor are still waiting. Many lack access and full rights to agricultural land and, as developments in Zimbabwe and South Africa show, they are getting angry. Where did post-independence land reform policy go wrong?

A report from the Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa (SLSA) project warns that rural livelihoods are under unprecedented stress and that governments and donors are failing to tackle poverty and inequality. The seizure of commercial farms in Zimbabwe and the rise of South Africa’s militant Landless People’s Movement show the effects of continued failure to address widespread demands for radical land reform.

The report shows the limitations and failures of land reform in the post-independence period:

• While Mozambique’s Land Law of 1997 set out to protect both the customary rights of occupiers of communal land, and of private companies and individual land owners, its overall effect has been to leave intact the unequal nature of property relations and to encourage investment in land by a wealthy elite.
• Trapped in poverty, Mozambique’s peasant communities often feel they have little alternative except to sign over communal lands in exchange for vague promises.
• Legislation, designed to protect the rights of occupiers of commercial farms in South Africa and former state enterprises and cooperatives in Mozambique, has proven inadequate in the face of determined action by private landowners and commercial interests – many of whom have close connections to the state.
• Though widely lauded as a success, cases ‘settled’ under South Africa’s restitution programme may not involve an actual return of the land; many claimants who have been granted ‘land rights’ are given a share of the output of the farms but not allowed, under the terms of the title transfer agreements, to reside or grow anything on ‘their’ land.
• In the former ‘homelands’ (the Bantustans established by the apartheid regime, to which many Black South Africans were confined) the government has dragged its feet on reform of communal tenure (in which land use rights are derived from membership of communities or tribes) for fear of upsetting so-called ‘traditional leaders’.

Blaming the Mugabe regime for Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, cronyism and the violence which has accompanied land seizures should not detract from acknowledging the enormous popular pressure for land redistribution in southern Africa. Redistributing land may mean it is disproportionately allocated to members of the ruling elite, but it is addressing a real need and is likely to lead to a more sustainable system of property rights in the long-term.

The implications which the author draws from these findings include:

• Land rights are more likely to be enforced where they serve, rather than challenge, the interests of the powerful or free-market reform.
• An exclusively rights-based approach to land reform may overlook the need for major redistribution of assets and fail to address fundamental causes of rural poverty and inequality.
• Formal rights have been forgotten amid the current scramble for access to land in Zimbabwe; the failure to address tenure reform is likely to lead to struggles around land rights – as distinct from land access – emerging as a key issue.

Zimbabwe should act as a wake-up call to neo-liberals to find more effective means of land redistribution. The current neo-liberal and market-based approaches cannot redress the crisis afflicting rural areas caused by unemployment, the poor returns on small-scale agriculture, lack of access to health and education, recurring drought and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Source(s):
‘Land and livelihoods: the politics of land reform in Southern Africa’ by Edward Lahiff,  IDS Bulletin Vol 34 No 3, pp 54-63, July 2003
‘The politics of land reform in southern Africa’ by Edward Lahiff, Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa Research Paper 19, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, March 2003 Full document.

Funded by: DFID Rural Livelihoods Department Policy Research Programme

id21 Research Highlight: 9 January 2004

Further Information:
Edward Lahiff
Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies
School of Government
University of the Western Cape
Private Bag X17
Bellville 7535
Cape Town
South Africa
www.uwc.ac.za/plaas

Tel: 27 21 959 3733
Fax: 27 21 959 3732
Contact the contributor: elahiff@uwc.ac.za

School of government, University of the Western Cape

Oliver Burch
Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa (SLSA)
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK
www.ids.ac.uk/slsa

Tel: 44 (0) 1273 606261
Fax: 44 (0) 1273 621202/691647
Contact the contributor: o.burch@ids.ac.uk

Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa, Institute of Development Studies

Other related links:
'Reversing land dispossession in Southern Africa'

'Listening to local perceptions: land resettlement in Zimbabwe'

IRIN Web Special on land reform in Southern Africa

'The Politics of Land Reform in Southern Africa'