ANC urges land reform to meet poverty-relief, growth targets

from Business Day

Political Editor

THE African National Congress (ANC) says government’s land and agrarian reform process needs to be accelerated to absorb greater numbers of the country’s army of unemployed and the large unskilled labour force.

The ANC made the call after a meeting of its national executive lekgotla at the weekend. Speaking at a media briefing in Johannesburg yesterday, ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said that the “land question remains a challenge” for SA.

“More land will have to be released so that we can address the issues of poverty and unemployment,” he said.

Ngonyama said the ANC acknowledged that land had to be released to encourage greater participation in the agricultural sector.

The call signals a realisation by the ruling party that its 2004 election promise to halve poverty and unemployment will be impossible to achieve without a comprehensive rural development strategy focusing on chronic unemployment and underdevelopment in the country side.

The ANC said the process of land and agrarian reform was part of existing government policy, but needed to be accelerated so that there were opportunities for people to engage in the agricultural sector.

“The lekgotla confirmed that the public sector should be leading growth and development in critical sectors of the economy, such as energy and transport,” Ngonyama said.

“The state should also seek to maximise the absorption of unskilled workers into the economy, including through the promotion of labour-intensive technologies, additional resources to the expanded public works programme, expansion of the National Youth Service, and transformation of the labourintensive agrarian economy.”

These twin challenges have marred the ANC government’s economic achievements thus far despite unprecedented growth in the past few years.

Abject poverty in SA’s countryside is also a black mark against ANC rule, and government has yet to develop strategies that will uplift the millions of people trapped in rural poverty and stem the inevitable drift towards the cities, which places an additional strain on service provision in the country’s major urban municipalities.

Both the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party have continuing campaigns involving the rural poor centred on promoting rural co-operatives and a call for the faster release of land from both private owners and the state to encourage noncommercial labour-intensive food production.

As a result of the mobilisation of these groupings, government was last year forced to review its “willing buyer, willing seller” principle after the watershed National Land Summit, where agrarian reform activists identified this principle as a stumbling block to overturning the apartheid legacy that still blights large parts of the countryside.

The ANC’s national executive committee also called for the scaling up of government’s extended public works programme, envisaged by government as a key driver of its efforts to create employment.

“The lekgotla recognised that critical elements of a significantly higher growth path have begun to emerge, and underpin the improvement in economic performance,” said Ngonyama.

“However, serious constraints and challenges remain.

“These will be addressed through the speedy implementation of the measures contained in the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative.”

The ANC lekgotla at the weekend preceded the cabinet lekgotla currently under way and received inputs from several commissions, including one on economic transformation.