Land Mess nothing short of an absolute scandal

THE tenure of minister Lulu Xingwana at agriculture and land affairs illustrates precisely what has gone wrong in the government under former president Thabo Mbeki.

Since her appointment in 2006, her department has lurched from disastrous underdelivery on policy undertakings to gross mismanagement of the agencies in her charge.

The Land Bank's annual report tabled in Parliament this week gave an a insight into how a lack of internal controls, poor lending practices, wasteful expenditure, irregular appointments, fraud, negligence and gross misconduct disregarded the constituency it was created to serve.

While the rapid slide at the Land Bank graphically illustrates how weak political leadership will ruin the day-to-day functioning of government, the damage at the institution is reversible. To that purpose, administrative authority of the bank was transferred to Finance Minister Trevor Manuel in July. The lapse of commercial agricultural development and the evaporation of opportunities in the formal farming and support sectors is similarly a temporary setback, however disastrous SA's belated response to soaring global commodity prices may seem.

Far more serious , however, is the near complete paralysis of land and agrarian reform. With the now rare exception of a number of unreconstructed racist proponents of the old order, no one doubts the urgent importance of transferring the ownership of the country from a white minority to the people. Yet, the Land Claims Commission is still to get to grips with the bulk of the work of achieving justice for millions of people dispossessed under racist legislation since 1913. The restitution process has been bedeviled by poor administration of the land claims process and an inexplicable inability of the agriculture ministry to deliver development support to the people supposed to benefit materially from the policies executed in the land ministry.

Increasingly, throughout rural SA, new injustices are being visited upon people who have got the short end of the stick for centuries. The twisted irony is that millions of hectares of land are available to establish emerging farmers, either through the property market or, as municipal land audits now trickling in are showing, through making available vast tracts of land in the possession of the state.

But even in the handful of cases where emerging farmers have fought their way past obtuse bureaucrats to gain access to modest plots of land, they complain that the single greatest impediment to success is not their lack of skill or even the unforgiving nature of the climate, but the administration of agriculture in its various government manifestations.

The failures outlined above are nothing short of an absolute scandal. The lack of delivery and support from a supposedly sympathetic government not only fails to transform the countryside, but it has the potential of catapulting social, political and economic instability from the back country into every sphere of South African life.

The mess at the Land Bank alone seems enough to sink the career of any politician; the catastrophe perpetrated in land reform at the department under Xingwana has firmly shown her to be no friend of the people. As the new order in South African politics unfolds, the best they may hope for the redeployment of the minister elsewhere in the government -- as far away from agriculture and land affairs as possible.