State Of The ZZzzzZZzz...

Farrel — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:17:00 -0600

Well judging by the complete lack of response to the the President’s State of the Nation in the SA blogosphere and the rather muted responses from opposition leaders it seems that it was rather boring filled with everything the President is expected to say. The only thing cauing any comment is the government’s indication they might review the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ approach to land reform which is moving along slowly. Which has been hinted at for months now so it’s not really that much of a bombshell anyway.

Anyway on to the important stuff. Anyone know when it’s time for the budget speech?

"State Of The ZZzzzZZzz..." by DA Mal

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:46:27 -0600

Okay, here’s my (long) take on land reform changes:

‘Willing seller, willing buyer’ is a sacred cow, and arguments about it serve only to obscure real problems with the government’s land policy.

All legitimate governments must balance the rights of property owners against their country’s need for roads, as an example. If a road must be built, then owners of private property must cooperate. So long as there are checks and balances to prevent corruption then where’s the problem?

The difference here is that the government is not buying private land for public purposes, but is buying land for other private owners. But this is a political difference, and various factions prefer to look at this difference through the prisms of Apartheid and Zimbabwe.

Read Farmer’s Weekly: problems with the government’s land redistribution program have rather less to do with redistribution; problems arise from farming inexperience, corruption and the establishment of inefficient communal models of land ownership. It’s rather on these points that the government must be criticised.

It’s easy to see that the rate of redistribution will be increased by abandonment of ‘willing seller, willing buyer’. But it will solve nothing, absolutely nothing, if the ‘willing buyer’s’ beneficiaries, the impoverished rural peasants, discover their livelihood collapses and they are forced to sell their new land back to those who sold it to them in the first place.

There is little in present government policy to prevent a sad Latin American outcome: immigration to the cities creating a continuing housing crisis and urban poverty; depopulation of the countryside resulting in the collapse of its democratic power; despoliation of environmental treasures by agribusiness; substitution by those peasants that remain of illegal drug cash crops for subsistence crops; radicalisation of the urban control of the countryside…

Politics.za: State Of The ZZzzzZZzz...

State Of The ZZzzzZZzz...

"State Of The ZZzzzZZzz..." by DA Mal