By Simon Nare
Deputy President Paul Mashatile has committed the government to availing resources to help land claim beneficiaries farm to avoid arable land being wasted as witnessed in the past.
Answering questions in the National Council of Provinces on Thursday, Mashatile admitted that there was a considerable amount of land that was returned to its original owners through land claims, but that land lay fallow.
Mashatile said he had witnessed firsthand how beneficiaries were not able to work the land. This was concerning, especially when it was farming land.
He said the government has now made it its mission to ensure that those who had been given their land back through the restitution process, had the skills to ensure land was productive.
“What we have decided to do is that when we do land reform, we distribute land and we ensure land restitution, we need to make sure that people who are settling in that land, particularly farming land, have the capacity to keel the land,” he said.
Mashatile said the government was also aware that forums set up in the past to manage complicated matters concerning land restitution often faced internal conflicts.
‘So we need to be alive in all those issues. So I am happy that the Commission on Land Restitution is coming up with projects that is going to unblock all this. But in particular, the Ministry on Land Reform and the Ministry of Agriculture need to jointly be able to support these people.
“Most of them fall under the category of emerging farmers. If they don’t have a proper equipment and so on, they won’t be able to utilise the land properly. But I agree that we should not allow land to lie fallow,” he said.
Mashatile admitted that the process of land restitution has been incredibly slow, but the introduction of initiatives by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights such as project “Kuyasa” were geared at accelerating the process and dealing with backlogs.
“We have always maintained that the finalisation of outstanding land claims remains one of the key priorities of this government. Over successive years, we have made good progress regarding the settlement of land claims and returning the land to those who were previously dispossessed. However, much more still needs to be done.
“In accelerating land access and land reform, government is working towards the conclusion of restitution cases, which includes prioritising old-order claims that would see the transfer of legally secure and legally registrable tenure to claimants with settlement packages,” he said.
Mashatile said the commission has developed a Backlog Reduction Strategy to create a detailed database of all outstanding claims to be settled. The strategy focused on improved policies and standard operating procedures to reduce the time it took to settle land claims.
He said following the Land Access Movement of South Africa judgment, the Land Claims Court held that new order land claims must be interdicted pending finalisation of old-order claims, or until new amended legislation has been enacted.
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