Unions: Speed up land redistribution
031208 Senwes grain silo and one of a combine harvester during maize harvest time.no byline picture supplied 5 031208 Senwes grain silo and one of a combine harvester during maize harvest time.no byline picture supplied 5
Two powerful trade unions have called on the government to speed up land redistribution, saying it was moving at a snail’s pace, as the targets have not been met.
With only 7 percent of land being transferred through the redistribution programme so far, South Africa has admitted that it would not be able to meet its target of distributing 30 percent of agricultural land by next year.
Members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and the Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) picketed outside the Land Claims Commission offices in Pietermaritzburg on Friday to voice their concerns about this issue.
The three-month, nationwide pickets would culminate in the unions holding a mock referendum on whether the property clause should be removed from the constitution.
The unions said they felt the Expropriation Bill would
be frustrated by the property clause in the constitution which makes the courts the final arbiter in compensation.
“We do not think that an untransformed judiciary will have a broad interpretation of what is meant by just and equitable compensation,” they said.
They proposed that a reconstituted land claims court, instead of normal courts, be the institutions that dealt with compensation.
The two unions said they wanted a complete register detailing who owns what, to be published.
The two Cosatu-affiliates said they had noted high levels of concentration and centralisation in the agricultural sector.
They said small players were denied access to the markets, or were subjected to “exploitative conduct by cartels”. This had led to high prices and collusion in procurement and price fixing.
Fawu and Numsa also called for more protection for farmworkers and dwellers. They said that between 1995 and 2004, more than two million black people had left white-owned farms where they lived, with 930 000 of these being evicted.
They said this was because of the failure of the Land Reform Act, the Extension of Sec-urity of Tenure Act and the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act. They wanted these laws to be reviewed. - The Daily News