The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Glenn Ashton -
Reams have been written about corporate land acquisitions around the world - land grabs, if you will. The hard reality is that there is a sound business case to be made for commercial interests to aggressively attempt to control the very foundation of the food chain, the land itself.
Through direct control of suitable land it is possible not only to control food production but also to manage whatever else happens on, around and with the land. This extends further than simply the corporate...
Anna Majavu -
Does the ANC intend to expropriate any land any time soon? President Jacob Zuma doesn’t appear to care for the landless at all. He doesn’t seem to believe that landlessness is even a problem.
Zuma caused alarm last week when he claimed that South Africans were going hungry and living in squalid conditions because they were too lazy to work the land or build their own houses. This was a reminder of the attitude of the previous Thabo Mbeki administration, under which people...
Richard Pithouse -
At a public discussion on the land question in Johannesburg on Friday, February 27, Dikgang Moseneke, the Deputy Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court, began his remarks with a well-known quote from Frantz Fanon: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
He spoke about the centrality of the land question to the struggle against apartheid and argued...
Stephen Greenberg -
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has identified “expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution in use” as one of the party’s “seven non-negotiable cardinal pillars for economic freedom in our lifetime”.
To realise this goal, the EFF’s national assembly held in December 2014 passed resolutions on land. The resolutions are very schematic, with only seven points, although they do provide some indication of the...
In recent months, it has been reported that the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, under the auspices of the Ingonyama Trust, is preparing to lodge a massive land claim that will cover much of the land in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Why is King Zwelithini lodging a land claim that goes back to 1875 when South Africa’s land restitution programme only recognizes land dispossessions after 1913?
Speaking at an event hosted by SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) to examine...
Stephen Greenberg -
Just before the 2014 national elections, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) announced a plan to redistribute 50% of commercial farm land to farm workers as part of ongoing efforts to redress historical imbalances in the country. The objectives of the plan are laudable: to deracialise the rural economy; to democratise the allocation and use of land by race, gender and class; and (less clearly) to support “production discipline” for food security and food...
