Independent Newspapers
ANC MP Lulu Johnson said he was concerned to hear that some who received land were releasing it to white owners. Photo: Melinda Stuurman
Durban – A massive land audit is to be held to determine racial patterns of land ownership, and landowners can expect to be subpoenaed and forced to declare their land ownership if necessary.
The government is also setting its sights on “strategic” parcels of land owned by foreigners living in South Africa or abroad, with the intention of releasing the land for restitution.
The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform said part of the plan was to overhaul the land registration system in the deeds office and reintroduce the “racial classification” of ownership, which stopped in 1994.
This was announced by Mdu Shabane, the director-general of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, while briefing the ad hoc committee on land reform on Monday.
The committee was set up earlier this year to co-ordinate and oversee the “reversing (of) the legacy of the Natives Land Act”.
Shabane said it was proposed that the process would be led by a land management commission, which would have the powers to subpoena all South Africans to provide information about their land holdings.
The commission would be set up in line with the Land Management Commission Bill, which the department was almost ready to submit for cabinet approval.
Shabane said it was also critical to determine how much land was owned by non-South Africans.
“We believe that as much as many argue that what non-South Africans own is insignificant, it may be strategic,” said Shabangu.
He said this land would be dealt with in the second phase of the land restitution process.
The government expects that thousands more claims will be submitted once the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill becomes law.
The bill seeks to extend, from December 1998 to December 2018, the deadline for lodging land restitution claims.
Shabane said the land management commission would be led by a serving judge.
“The commission will propose among other things to have the powers from time to time to call on South Africans to declare their land holdings so that we know who owns what land where,” he said.
“We propose that it should have the powers to subpoena those who may refuse to declare.”
Shabane said that the land registration system in the deeds office would be changed in a separate but linked process.
“In the past, the land registration system in the deeds office could do racial classification. That was before 1994. With the advent of democracy the racial classification was done away with.”
As a result, the department did not know who owned what land among the “thousands and thousands, if not millions, of deeds in the deeds office”.
“We are busy with a massive project in the deeds office to move away from the paper-based land registration to an electronic system,” said Shabane.
With the electronic system, officials would be able to “tell us at any given time, as transactions happen, who is buying from whom and what land, where and at what price”.
“That is what we are working on – and the Deeds Electronic Registration Bill is ready.
“We are hoping that during this year (the) cabinet at least will approve those bills and hopefully we can introduce them to Parliament next year.”
The committee was briefed by Chief Land Claims Commissioner Nomfundo Gobodo on progress made in land restitution.
MPs called on the commission to discourage beneficiaries from choosing financial compensation rather than land.
Gobodo said the commission had spent 100 percent of its budget in 2012/13 and had received an unqualified audit report for that financial year.
She said the commission on restitution of land rights had also met its targets.
The commission had spent R15 billion on land purchases and R7.5bn on financial compensation.
ANC MP Lulu Johnson said he was concerned to hear that some who received land were “releasing” it to “white owners”.
“To what extent are we able to get our people to shy away from receiving money and have them valuing land? To what extent are we discouraging people?” asked Johnson.
IFP MP Russell Cebekhulu, who is a traditional leader, said history showed that during forced removals some people had to move to areas under other traditional leaders’ control.
“We are seeing people from ‘area X’ lodging a claim in ‘area Y,’ whereas those areas are under the control of traditional leaders,” said Cebekhulu.
“One has seen people from the area of one inkosi lodging a claim in the the area of another inkosi.”
ANC MP Mandla Mandela asked the commission why urban claims were solved more quickly than rural claims.
“I’d like to find out what are the factors influencing that, because we have a trend that rural communities are becoming secondary citizens in our country and their issues are not taken up as quickly as they should be,” said Mandela.
The commission wants to establish 52 sites across the country at which people can lodge their land claims.
Political Bureau
