South Africa has announced that it will miss a self-imposed deadline of 2014 to redistribute a third of the country’s land from white to black farmers. There is much to lament in this decision. Land reform is necessary, many of the black masses have not seen the benefits of the New South Africa that have been enjoyed by a slowly growing few, and this news provides grist for the mill of the ANC’s critics from the left.
And yet if the nightmare of land reform in Zimbabwe has taught us anything it is that it is better to do land reform right than to do it fast. Even as we lament the delay — 2014, after all, will mark two decades since Nelson Mandela’s election symbolized a new dawn in the country’s history — we should celebrate the way in which South African officials have not used land reform as a weapon. Consider Robert Mugabe: In the years prior to 2000 Mugabe and his ZANU-PF used the threat of land reform as a Damocles sword hanging over the head of the country’s whites without at the same time developing a coherent, structured, equitable plan for redistribution. Thus when the dam broke in 2000 and Mugabe let land “reform” go forward, chaos and violence reigned. Redistribution became a form of delayed retribution against white farmers. Those who took the land over often had no clue how to utilize it and what was once the breadbasket of Africa became nearly useless agriculturally. These disastrous policies are almost certainly the single biggest cause of the country’s economic calamity over the last decade.
A bad land reform policy, and especially one that is so brazenly used as a political weapon, is worse than no reform at all. If delay in South Africa means that there will be an equitable, coherent plan, perhaps we can live with delay. At the same time, to steal and paraphrase a quotation from the American Civil Rights Movement, land reform delayed is land reform denied. The purpose of this delay needs to be to ensure that when redistribution does happen, South Africa has all of the resources to ensure its success. The lesson of Zimbabwe looms large. Let’s hope that the South African government is drawing the right lessons from Zimbabwe’s shame.
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