Land group calls for Zim-style invasions

A South African land rights group warned on Wednesday of the possibility of land invasions similar to those in Zimbabwe if land reform was not speeded up, Reuters reported. The director of the independent National Land Committee (NLC) said there was rising anger over the pace of land reform. Land seizures were an expression of hunger for land taken away under apartheid, he said.
Seizures of mainly white-owned land in neighbouring Zimbabwe were a “wake-up call” and a warning of what could happen in South Africa if land reform did not meet expectations, NLC Director Zakes Hlatshwayo said.

He made the comments to Reuters despite a rebuke on Tuesday from Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza who said the government was looking for ways to speed up the process of returning people to their land. The NLC, which has branches across the country, was set up in the 1980s to oppose the apartheid state. It supported the recent invasion of a farm by a group of people near Kuruman in the Northern Cape Province. The police arrested 19 people.

The group said they had been forced from the land by the apartheid-era government and were unhappy with the lack of progress in getting it back under the new government. “Land reform has not happened as everyone anticipated,” NLC director Zakes Hlatshwayo told Reuters. “Zimbabwe was a wake-up call to the government and all those involved in land reform that if one does not meet the expectations of the landless and the poor the situation of Zimbabwe would become inevitable in South Africa,” Hlatshwayo said. Hundreds of mainly white-owned commercial farms have been seized in Zimbabwe by self-styled war veterans. President Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe has backed the invasions and foreign investors have expressed alarm at the lawlessness.