Landless demand South Africa reform

by AKANI CHAUKE 
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – SOUTH Africa’s newly constituted Council of the Left has placed land redistribution at the centre of its campaign for economic justice, calling for an organised struggle to break the country’s deeply unequal pattern of land ownership.

The Council argues that millions of black South Africans remain landless, insecurely housed or confined to poorly located land more than three decades after apartheid ended, while substantial agricultural and well-located urban land remains concentrated in relatively few hands.

Land ownership figures are contested, but government and academic research confirms that South Africa’s land distribution remains highly unequal.

A 2017 Land Audit found that white South Africans owned about 72 percent of individually owned agricultural and farm land, while researchers have warned that available statistics are incomplete and methodologies differ.

For the Council, however, the central question is not simply statistics but historical dispossession and present-day access.

Among the prominent voices behind the push are Thami Hukwe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party of Azania; Sam Matiase, EFF MP and Mayoral Candidate for Mangaung; and Mazibuko Jara of the Zabalaza Pathways Institute.

The three are listed as contacts for the Council of the Left.

They argue that land reform must prioritise the landless majority and challenge what they describe as a system in which black South Africans continue to bear the consequences of dispossession.

The campaign is particularly focused on defending the Expropriation Act and advancing the proposed Equitable Access to Land Bill.

The Council says the legislation should provide a basis for large-scale redistribution, secure tenure, affordable housing, agrarian transformation and access to well-located urban and rural land.

The activists also challenge demands for compensation from those who, in their view, inherited or acquired land through systems established by colonial conquest and apartheid dispossession.

They argue that asking black South Africans to pay for land they believe was historically taken from their forebears amounts to perpetuating the injustice rather than correcting it.

Their position places the land question within a wider struggle against poverty, unemployment and inequality.

The Council says land occupations and housing struggles should not simply be treated as criminal matters because they reflect a deeper social crisis.

It argues that people occupy land because affordable housing is unavailable, employment opportunities are concentrated in certain areas and apartheid-era spatial patterns remain substantially intact.

The organisation has pledged to support campaigns against proposed changes to eviction legislation while mobilising communities behind equitable land access.

Its broader programme includes opposition to austerity, stronger public services, food security, public healthcare, employment creation and support for working-class communities.

The Council insists that land redistribution cannot be achieved through legislation alone.

It wants landless communities, workers, rural organisations and social movements to become the driving force behind reform.

For Hukwe, Matiase, Jara and their allies, the argument is ultimately about restoring dignity and economic power to people who remain excluded from South Africa’s land economy.

– CAJ News