Promised Land. Karl Kemp
had immediately set about deliberately suspending disciplinary hearings and reinstated officials implicated in fraud and corruption.
The latest incarnation of the department was created by President Ramaphosa in June 2019 by merging DAFF with the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, calling it the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development. Thoko Didiza, the minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs from 1999 to 2006, reassumed the newly titled position.
The department has seen some of the worst examples of tainted officials being redeployed. Director-general of the pre-amalgamated Department of Rural Development and Land Reform Petrus Mdu Shabane was fired in 2017 for ‘serious misconduct’ involving ‘breaches of the Public Finance Management Act in a contract to digitise deeds records, and hundreds of millions of rand in wasteful expenditure’, as the Daily Maverick reported. Shabane was reinstated in late 2019 via a Presidential Minute, and a labour court ruling against him was dismissed and his legal fees bill footed by government. His is just one of several cases.
The director-general of DAFF who had joined Shabane under Didiza’s stewardship in the new department, Mike Mlengana, was the subject of a virulent Public Service Commission (PSC) report in November 2019, which held that Mlengana had driven the department ‘to ruin’ through mismanagement. ‘The department under his leadership had to return R30-million to the National Treasury after failing to use it to establish a monitoring and evaluation unit to assist in the support of upcoming farmers,’ reported Farmer’s Weekly, quoting directly from the report. ‘The PSC is seriously concerned by the toxic, divisive, factionalised and unprofessional environment within the department. This report does show some of the most unprofessional conduct by the responses of some of the employees to the outcomes of the PSC’s investigation.’ Mlengana had been the subject of an internal investigation in 2017 for ‘financial mismanagement’, the findings of which were overturned on a technicality by the courts. By late June 2020, he resigned from his post, citing an ‘absolute lack of delivery knowledge and work ethic’ within the department in communications with Farmer’s Weekly.
In March 2018, the state’s Special Investigative Unit (SIU) submitted a report on land reform fraud to the Presidency. It had investigated 148 land reform projects and found fraud ‘on an enormous scale’, with government officials dealing out farmland to anyone for the right price, and recommended prosecutions for forty-two individuals. Business Day obtained the report a year later through a Promotion of Access to Information Act request and made good work of publishing its contents. News reports noted with tentative worry that despite the recommendation of the SIU, no prosecutions had yet been made, and the matter faded into the quagmire of political scandals South Africans are bombarded with on an almost monthly basis.
In May 2019, around the same time Didiza again assumed control of the department, the Mail & Guardian published the results of a four-year investigation into land reform fraud by the Special Assignment team of investigative journalists. The report revealed nothing ‘new’, but the scale and detail of the graft was shocking, even to hardened cynics. The paper dubbed the central corrupt practice ‘farm flipping’ – ‘buying farms in distress at low prices, selling them to government at heavily inflated prices and returning to the farm as strategic partners to further profit, allegedly often at the expense of the intended beneficiaries of agricultural land reform’. These schemes, the report says, involve foreign multinationals that work through local BEE partners and their ruling-party contacts, creating an array of shelf companies in order to launder money and defraud funding for the projects. Chief among those implicated in the report is none other than Gugile Nkwinti.
But perhaps the biggest slap in the face of the South African public was the 2013 MalaMala case, another of Nkwinti’s projects. It is the single largest amount paid for a land restitution project in South Africa’s history, coming in at an estimated R1 billion and wiping out the department’s annual budget. To put the enormity of this sum into context, the investigative group Oxpeckers noted that ‘the price of 36 489 claims involving about 85 000 urban households made by December 2002 was R1.2 billion … In the year prior to the MalaMala deal, R1.6 billion was used nationally to buy land for 549 claims, and in 2011 less than R1 billion was spent on 252 claims.’
The claim was so controversial and shrouded in secrecy that it is still being investigated and picked apart eight years later. The settlement between the state and the farm owners was reached out of court, hence the difficulty in obtaining details, highlighting the lack of transparency entrenched in the land reform programme.
The land under claim comprised areas within some of the most luxurious game resorts in the world at the western border of the Kruger National Park. The 960 claimants lodged their paperwork in 2002. A secret deal was struck in 2013, after government rejected the initial valuation of R750 million as too expensive, and a new company was incorporated to share ownership between the previous owners and the community, which was herded into a Communal Property Association (CPA) for this purpose. By 2019 the CPA was riven with infighting and had gone to court several times, accusing its own lawyer and numerous government officials of hoarding the payouts under the agreements for themselves. The claimants had been divided among various villages at the time of their forced removal in the 1940s, and scholars who had worked on the initial claim raised the issue that some of these claimants had never been part of an overarching ‘community’ or ‘tribe’. It later emerged that this ‘community’ had not actually been eligible for restitution in the first place. The original owners remain in control, and several state officials conceivably found themselves with fatter bank accounts.
Corrupt state officials aren’t the only guilty parties. In South Africa, wherever state cash is being splashed, grifters tend to emerge.
In 2016, private investigator Paul O’Sullivan opened a case of fraud against Pieter Visagie, a well-known businessman in Mpumalanga. O’Sullivan claimed that Visagie had colluded with provincial officials to artificially inflate the prices of a number of dairy and vegetable farms in the Badplaas valley, Mpumalanga, which were up for sale to the state.
The web spread back to the early 2000s, and involved a financial entity called the Ndwandwa Trust, headed by Visagie. O’Sullivan alleged that the trust had been used as the main vehicle for the graft, defrauding the state to the tune of tens of millions of rands by lodging fake claims and overcharging for the farms. These claims were backed up by a whistle-blower named Fred Daniel, who’d been involved with land reform around Badplaas since the early ’90s, but at the time of writing have yet to coalesce into a court hearing or result in any convictions.
A previous case against Visagie and some of his alleged co-conspirators had been withdrawn from the Nelspruit Regional Court in 2013, but the claims resurfaced in the media in 2015, this time also involving senior politicians, including David ‘the Cat’ Mabuza, then premier of the province. It was alleged that Mabuza, who was MEC for agriculture and land administration between 2008 and 2009, had signed off on a task team report that helped disguise the worth of the land. Mabuza’s office strenuously denied the allegations. He is now deputy president of South Africa and chair of the inter-ministerial committee on land reform.
That these same politicians insist that the market has failed and that the state should take an even greater role in implementing land reform is almost beyond belief. And yet, in December 2017, the ANC passed an official resolution at its annual national conference in Nasrec vowing to ‘accelerate’ land reform by amending the Constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation. The conference had been convened under the theme ‘Remember Tambo: Towards Unity, Renewal and Radical Socio-Economic Transformation’.
EWC was reportedly the poisoned chalice from which Ramaphosa had to drink to ensure his victory and has since remained the hottest political topic. But the resolution was almost inevitable, given that ever since the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) rose to prominence as the ideological stick to the ANC’s carrot, the country’s younger, urban black generations have increasingly taken up calls for ‘revolution’ in response to South Africa’s patent inequalities.
‘WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND’, University of Cape Town student Wandile Dlamini wrote on the bill a young white waitress brought him at a restaurant in Observatory in Cape Town in 2016. The