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IF YOU follow the EFF’s Twitter account (@EFFSouthAfrica), you’ll have seen the tweets that accompanied Juju’s ‘land-grab’ court appearance in Newcastle, including:
1994 means nothing without the land! Victory is restoration of land into the hands of Black people!
The land comes wth the sea. The fish in the sea belong to us! The land comes with trees, even Dagga! It belongs 2 us!
No white man came carrying a Lion. They found it here! Everything that comes with the land belongs to us!
I couldn’t help thinking that, if the EFF fought for trading rights and commercial exploitation of cannabis, it could be a real winner for the South African fiscus…
How do we deal with the land issue? About a week later, respected senior business journalist Peter Bruce posed a solution in his Sunday Times column: since “the one thing we have in abundance is unoccupied land”, every poor South African should be allocated 1 000 m2 of land “as close to an existing town or city as possible”. (After this once-off allocation of land, for every child born “You deposit, in a bank account in their name, R20 000 on the day they’re born”. “You” presumably is the state – this in a column that declares that “capitalism is the only answer to poverty and inequality”.)
Hmmm.
There seems to be a bit of disagreement about exactly how many hectares of land South Africa covers, but let me take the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s slightly generous figure of 127 million hectares. There are about 55 million South Africans, at least 53% of whom live in poverty – about 29 million people. So far so good – there are about 4 hectares of land possibly available to give to ‘the poor’.
Except… all sources agree that only around 12% to 14% of the land is suitable for producing rain-fed crops. “With only 3% considered truly fertile land, South Africa falls short of other countries, such as India, where arable land covers 53% of the country. Most of South Africa’s land surface (69%) is suitable for grazing…” writes the World Wildlife Fund (Agriculture: Facts and Trends South Africa, WWF). Which means there are, at most, 2.75 hectares worth handing over to each of those 29 million people – if we assume they want to farm livestock; about half a hectare, if people want to grow crops, if my maths is right.
If they don’t - and internal migration stats suggest that a fat number of people in rural South Africa would much rather head for the bright lights of Gauteng (or Cape Town or eThekwini, the other top drawcards) - well, there just isn’t that much land to give away around the cities to enable each person to get a decent hectare.
I am all for the people in crowded settlements being given title to the land they occupy, while the EFF may want them to get title to land in the suburbs. No matter. Most people in those settlements remain out of work, with unemployment figures ticking up this year. Without paid work, they would be unable to contribute, via taxes, levies, invoices for energy and rubbish removal and water, whatever the mechanism, to the costs of keeping an urban settlement ticking over, a healthy, viable and sound place to live.
And how do we create jobs? Do we just go on ad infinitum encouraging ‘entrepreneurship’, in the belief that more small start-ups mean more jobs? Where does the demand come from for the products and services pouring out of these start-ups? How can they survive and grow if demand is not growing apace?
A sure way of generating demand is to put more money into the hands of those who currently have little or none. When people are getting more money, economic energy begins to circulate – with a couple of extra hundred rand in hand, a mother can add veggies and a bit of protein to the family diet of staples like pap.
(Which is a fantastic long-term investment in the productivity of this country, as it would go some way to addressing the stunting that currently affects about one in four of our children, impacting on cognitive and physical development and risk of future ill-health.) Money in the hands of the underprivileged is spent on immediate needs, not saved or invested.
Someone has to provide the veggies and protein – a spaza shop or a hawker might respond to this new demand. And they might need to employ an assistant, or a driver to get to the market… and so it goes, a tiny little whirlwind of economic activity that sweeps up some of the unemployment in its path.
How do we put more money into the hands of unemployed people? I’d suggest as radically a state-driven, social welfare idea as Bruce’s land allotment: a basic income grant, say R200 to each and every South African a month, that’s then taxed back from the middle class and rich. It can be done effectively and easily – see papers like this.
READ: Labour Wrap: Call for a universal basic income
Currently, the people in those swarming settlements around our big cities are feeling the pinch of the drought and the economy; R100 to R200 per person could be the difference between survival and death. And the economic energy it generates could damp down the violent and quite justified anger among those who have not yet seen the shadow of “a better life for all”.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
