Land reform: a comparative analysis of the Zimbabwean and South African processes since democratization

[摘要] English: As a process generally designed to redress colonial imbalances in land resources, addressissues of good governance, poverty reduction and promote sustainable economic growth,the phenomenon of redistributing land is not peculiar to Southern Africa. Althoughimplemented with variant methodologies and resultant implications, depending on acountry's ideologies and circumstances on the ground, land reform has been previouslyexperienced in various global countries such as Australia, Brazil, Kenya, Nicaragua,Peru, Chile and others. This research is primarily intended to explore how the process ofland reform has been handled in two multi-facetedly contiguous Southern Africancountries, namely Zimbabwe and South Africa. The central contention of the study beingthat, manifold forces have propelled and hampered land reform in the two countries andthat methodologies employed have intentionally and inadvertently provoked amultiplicity of problems and challenges. With a shared experience of colonial conquest, occupation, dispossession, land alienationand the need to re-gain independence through armed resistance, the land issue has alwaysbeen pivotal to the continuing struggle of both countries. Over the years, prime landwould change hands through discriminatory acts like the 1913 Native Land Act and itssequels in South Africa and the Land Husbantry Act in Zimbabwe. Black people wouldbe pushed to impoverished, dry, drought stricken Bantustans, homelands, reserves andtribal trust lands. To regain their freedom and their land, wars were fought andeventually independence granted through negotiated settlement. At the dawn ofindependence, one of the top priorities for the black led governments was to equitablyredistribute land resources. The study amply demonstrates that en route land reform itself has been fraught with allkinds of hurdles emanating from within and from without. From the onset, the negotiatedsettlements would control free choices of land policies for the nascent blackgovernments. The negotiated constitutions brought with them strings attached,guarantees for the minority and ensured that the legacy of colonialism was maintained. As a result, only politically and financially cheaper approaches to land reform wereemployed at the expense of the urgency with which reform was needed to reduce poverty,among other needs. In Zimbabwe, in the first decade of independence, land wasredistributed through the Willing Seller Willing Buyer mode (WSWB) via the market.Later, the government sought to hasten the land redistribution pace through the LRRPIIand the Fast Track Programme with disastrous results. In South Africa, with theobjective to restore land rights (restitution), redistribute land and reform tenure, theWSWB approach is still being used. To supplement the WSWB, affirmative action isalso engaged which includes reallocating state land, drawing up additional legal reforms,availing state aid programmes and limiting large farms. There has been very limitedexpropriation of land by the South African government as opposed to Zimbabwe. Lately,Zimbabwe has nationalized all land and issued 99 year leases to farmers. Theinternational community has adversely influenced land policy selection in the twocountries under discussion through withdrawal of donations, exerting political pressuresusing sanctions and calling for regime change.Taking the colonial histories of the two countries as a point of departure, this study seeksto give an appraisal of land reform and to interrogate critically post-independence landreform methodologies and implications thereof. In its overall approach, the researchendeavours to trace, state clearly and explicitly, compare, contrast and identify elementsof land reform policies to find out their nature and value in order to understand andexplain the programme.The research partially concludes that land reform shall go down in the annals of historyas a correctional measure that has, arguably, introduced a new complex dimension inZimbabwean politico-economics as well as influenced Southern Africa and theinternational world to view the region with fresh, pragmatic eyes.

[发布机构] University of the Free State