Strong opposition to new communal land rights bill

A new land bill, which activists say will give un-elected chiefs control over communal areas, is at the centre of a controversy over land reform in South Africa. Opposition to the Communal Land Rights Bill (CLRB) has been vociferous, with concerned NGOs going as far as placing an advert in a national daily newspaper to urge the public to reject the bill. The cabinet approved the CLRB for submission to parliament on 8 October, noting that the bill was "aimed at facilitating secure land tenure rights in communally held land within the framework of the constitution". However, the National Land Committee (NLC) and the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) has called on concerned South Africans to "stop the Communal Land Rights Bill" in an advertisement in the Business Day on Monday. "The recently cabinet-approved bill claims it would confer tenure security or ownership to over a third of South Africans living in the former homelands [semi-autonomous black territories established by the apartheid government]. This is far from the truth. The truth is the CLRB is essentially an apartheid piece of legislation disguised in new South African legal lingo," the advert said. The NGOs argued that the bill was "fundamentally flawed, and will undermine rather than strengthen the land rights of one-third of the population, those currently living in the former Bantustans [homelands]". They claim the bill undermines the rights of rural women and is a draconian law that gives "extraordinary powers and unlimited discretion to the minister of land affairs". They further argue that it allows rural communities "absolutely no choice about their land rights or land administration arrangements" by giving control over communal land to "un-elected chiefs, whether or not they enjoy any support". "It entrenches current conflict between local government and chiefs, [and] will spark innumerable boundary disputes," the NGOs warned. The process through which the department of land affairs developed the bill was slammed as "profoundly anti-democratic". "It has been untransparent, dishonest, and privileged the voices of traditional leaders," the NGOs added. Under the bill, traditional councils, created by the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Bill, will assume powers over land administration and ownership. The NGOs described it as "puzzling that the democratic government would legitimise these apartheid-era tribal authorities". Department of land affairs spokesman Abbey Makoe hit back, saying the NGOs had had sufficient time and access to the department to make their concerns known before the bill was approved by cabinet. "We are now finding ourselves having to deal with half-truths and untruths that are being systematically spread by people claiming to act in the interest of the landless in the country," Makoe said. With regard to the power of traditional chiefs over land issues, Makoe told IRIN that "to the best of my knowledge, there has never been any dispute about the legitimacy of rural chiefs", and the fact that they were "un-elected" was irrelevant. "Anyone who knows the system, or cared to find out how the system works, knows that chiefs are born - their positions are not elected positions. The fact that they are born to those positions has never been questioned by government or the ordinary citizenry in this country," he added. Responding to allegations that the right of rural women to security of tenure would be undermined by placing power in the hands of mostly male chiefs, Makoe said: "It is a blue lie that women in the traditional cultures are being sort of glossed over and left out. In fact, what the bill seeks to achieve in terms of gender equality is to ensure that a specific percentage, about 30 percent, of those elected to the traditional councils will be women." However, activists have pointed out that the bill provides no sanction, should traditional councils not have the required percentage of women. Analysts say that according to customary law, only men are allocated land and, consequently, women's access to land is dependent on their relationship to men. Makoe said it was unclear how the CLRB could contribute to boundary disputes or cause further friction between traditional leaders and local councils, as alleged by the NLC and PLAAS. "We are not talking about huge chunks of land without boundaries - there are already recognised boundaries. And in a post-apartheid South Africa there's room for the municipality and, equally, there's room for traditional leadership," he said. "We believe in, and have good examples of, co-existence between rural councils and municipalities. The royal Bafokeng administration operates ... smoothly alongside the local municipality of Rustenburg, [in the North West province] for example. There are similar cases in many areas of the country," Makoe added. The NLC and PLAAS have called on "concerned South African to reject the bill as fatally flawed, anti-democratic, and likely to undermine rather than strengthen land rights in communal areas".