Minister Gugile Nkwinti’s policy proposals requiring commercial farmers
to hand over half their farms to farmworkers seems to be yet another
attempt by white capital through the agency of the ANC to pull the wool
over our peoples eyes under the guise of economic transformation.
According to these policy proposals, the farm workers will assume
ownership of 50 percent of the farmlands that they work on which in
turn is proportional to the number of years each worker had worked on
the farm land. In this regard, as elaborated in the policy proposals,
workers with between 10 – 25 years service will share 10 percent, 25 –
50 years service will share 25 percent, more than 50 years service will
share 50 percent, and 15 percent will be available for household
subsistence farming. We are told that government pays for the 50
percent to be shared by the workers, and that this money will go to an
investment fund to be jointly owned by the parties constituting the new
ownership regime. Further this fund will be used for reinvestment in
the farm, skills improvement and to pay out those who want to opt out
of the arrangement. There’s no indication here of the provision of
adequate homesteads, sanitation, clean running water, health care,
education etc for the workers and their families. Also there is
seemingly no prohibition on the farmers buying back the workers share
in the farms and also no prohibition on the workers using their
respective shares as collateral for debt. This is not a law calling for
the expropriation of land without compensation for equal distribution
and meaningful use, neither does it involve an ownership regime that
will meaningfully benefit workers, their families and their
communities. It’s a policy proposal that is clearly not in the
interests of the workers (who can be an unlimited number). Besides this
process is likely to drag our people indefinitely and well beyond the
next five years. This seems to be a desperate attempt on the part of
the ANC to rally the counter-revolutionary forces of the bourgeoisie
and landowners to defeat the land revolution.
Land in this country is 80% agricultural. This is a huge proportion of
the land that the EFF is calling for to be expropriated without
compensation. 22 million people are landless and the ANC is trying to
divert our gaze from that to their supposed plan for a share ownership
regime for 700 000 farm workers.
The ruling party is running away from real land delivery! It’s also
clear that it will pay for half the farms they say will go to the
workers and this obviously will come from money that belongs to the
people which in any event is intended to secure the landed interests of
white capital. The ANC has since 1994 evicted over 1 million farm
workers and the current policy proposals that promises to transfer 50
percent of ownership in farmlands to farm workers effectively amounts
to a ” mass eviction campaign”, to be finalized by April 2015 as
suggested in the said proposals, against the remaining 700 000 farm
workers. Moreover the share ownership regime the ANC is proposing
effectively transfers no real ownership to the farm workers. Farm
workers get a fragmented kind of “interest” in the farms proportional
to the number of years of “disciplined” service they have given their
masters! Its clear most workers won’t even qualify for this pseudo
interest in the respective farmlands and those who do qualify will be
forced to sell their interest back to the farm owners!
Land must be expropriated without compensation to the land thieves! EFF
offered the ANC a gift of its own voter percentage in parliament to
make up the two thirds majority so as to realize “land expropriation
without compensation”, they said No! EFF, as the vanguard of the black
majority, must now lead its constituency in battle to liquidate the
counter revolutionary forces of white capital that are being rallied to
destabilize the land revolution!
We Are The One’s We Have Been Waiting For!
