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South Africa wants the state to have the first opportunity
to buy property entering the market to help speed up the redistribution
of white-owned land to blacks, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Whites still own over 90% of commercial farmland in South Africa, more
than a decade after the end of apartheid.
President Thabo Mbeki's government is under mounting pressure to erase
this legacy of decades of white minority rule and has said it will,
where necessary, use legal land seizures to accelerate reforms.
"Opportunities for the acquisition of land are being lost because
the state cannot be proactive in purchasing land," said Glen Thomas,
director general of the Department of Land Affairs, was quoted as saying
in the Afrikaans daily Beeld.
"The amendment will oblige all sellers, inside the state and outside
it, to offer their land to the state first," he said.
Officials say high land prices are one of the main obstacles to its
reform programme and blame white landowners for demanding exorbitant
prices in cases where the state wants to buy back land taken from blacks
under apartheid and colonialism.
Thomas said South Africa also hoped to halt a rise in land prices via
proposals to limit land ownership and institute a land tax, as it moves
towards its goal of giving blacks a third of land by 2014.
In a speech in February marking the opening of parliament, Mbeki promised
to speed up land reform, touching on a racially tinged issue.
Land redistribution is seen by the ruling ANC and its largely black
constituency as a cornerstone of black majority rule, but for many whites
it evokes the spectre of land seizures and agricultural collapse occurring
in neighbouring Zimbabwe.
The other plank of the land drive is to give blacks loans to purchase
their farms.
The newspaper said Thomas made the remarks on Tuesday to Parliament's
portfolio committee on land affairs in Cape Town.
He said a constitutional change may be needed to effect the proposals
but did not say by when such laws could be implemented. Land affairs
officials could not be immediately reached for comment. - Reuters
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Newsletter:
12 March to 19 March 2010 - Vaal Triangle, South Africa
