| 2010 02 25 ‘Court denies claim state cannot afford’, Business Day |
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THE Land Claims Court has made a landmark ruling against restoring land to a community dispossessed under apartheid because the state cannot afford it.
The court ruled that only grave sites on several farms near Rustenburg in the North West, not 7 500ha of highly productive agricultural land worth an estimated R70m, would be restored to the Baphiring community. The ruling is likely to set a precedent for thousands of outstanding rural land claims on highly capitalised commercial farms, forestry plantations and game lodges, and could offer the Land Claims Commission a neat way out of its chronic budget crisis. The commission faced massive backlogs worth billions in signed commitments to land owners and claimant communities that it could not afford to honour. Its budget allocation has dropped to R1,7bn from R2,1bn last year. No extra allocations were made despite several requests to the Treasury last year. This fiscal year the commission plans to spend R1,1bn to meet previous commitments, 25% of which is ringfenced for post-settlement support. No new commitments will be made this year. Farmers' union AgriSA expressed surprise at the ruling yesterday, hailing it as a major turning point in the government's approach to land restitution. "This is a radical departure by focusing for the first time on land as a productive asset," said its deputy president, Theo de Jager. But community representatives said they planned to appeal the ruling and warned of imminent land invasions to publicise their opposition. The costs of buying and maintaining the farms were astron omical, the court heard. The R70m price tag for the land did not include the "substantial" cost of compensating landowners for "solatium and the financial losses which will be suffered as (a) result of the expropriation", the judgment said. Expert witnesses told the court equipment and running capital costs alone would amount to another R65m. The court ruled that it was therefore not feasible to return 400 Baphiring families to their ancestral land while keeping the farms productive. "Resources in terms of expertise and financial assistance is necessary but lacking in the present case," the judgment said. A state attorney said the Rural Development and Land Reform Ministry, which the commission falls under, supported restoring the community's ancestral land but the state could not afford to pay for it. He recommended that "equitable redress" be limited to R2,6m in the form of a R6500 cash pay-out for each family. "It's a harsh one," Baphiring leader Christian Mabalane said yesterday. "We are going to appeal and toyi-toyi ... this is not fair compensation. Government must find the money." His forebears were forced off their land at gunpoint in the 1970s and moved to Mabaalstad, an arid, infertile reserve 80km away. STEPHAN HOFSTATTER
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