Browsing by Author "Wisborg, Poul"

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    Contested land tenure reform in South Africa: The Namaqualand experience
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2004) Wisborg, Poul; Rohde, Rick
    The legacy of apartheid land policy in South Africa remains one of the most conspicuous manifestations of past injustices. To correct this legacy, diverse land reform efforts have centred on the constitutional mandate for land restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. The Transformation of Certain Rural Areas Act 94 of 1998 (Trancraa) is the first post-apartheid legislation to be passed and implemented to reform 'communal' land tenure. It aims to transfer state land in 23 former 'coloured rural areas' to residents or accountable local institutions. During 2001 and 2002 civil society organisations, local people, municipalities and the Department of Land Affairs introduced the Act in six areas in Namaqualand of the Northern Cape. During the same period, a Communal Land Rights Bill for the former 'homelands' has been the subject of consultation, published in August 2002, and adopted in a fundamentally revised version by Cabinet in October 2003 and by Parliament in February 2004. With its reliance on non-elected 'traditional councils', the Communal Land Rights Bill of 2003 departs in major ways from the policy approach of Trancraa. Trancraa was enacted in the context of the 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy with its emphasis on individual rights and community choice about ownership and administration of land. The Act emphasised the role of municipalities both in implementation of tenure reform and envisaged future governance. In spite of dramatic policy changes, the experience of implementing Trancraa in Namaqualand may hold lessons for the implementation of the Communal Land Rights Bill with respect to resources, process, power relations and protection of rights. The Trancraa process represents a small but significant investment by government, but the time, funding and institutional support required to carry out effective tenure reform was seriously underestimated. Furthermore, the Act and implementation process did not address the constitutional right to 'comparable redress', and did not include land development or guarantees of future institutional support. Strengthened tenure rights appear vulnerable if isolated from training, finance and integrated development initiatives. A neo-liberal assumption that 'property rights' and 'markets' by themselves will transform rural areas where people are in deep crisis due to unemployment, HIV/Aids, corruption and food insecurity appears ill-founded and dangerous.
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    Farm workers and farm dwellers in Limpopo, South Africa: Struggles over tenure, livelihoods and justice
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2013) Wisborg, Poul; Hall, Ruth; Shirinda, Shirhami; Zamchiya, Phillan
    Stories about farm workers and dwellers losing their homes, land and livelihoods are common in contemporary South Africa, and also in Limpopo Province. Around 1988, Grace M.1 and her children were evicted from a Limpopo farm, where she had lived for more than twenty years and given birth to seven children. Strictly speaking, it was the cattle owned by Grace and her husband that were evicted, as the landowner wanted to reserve all the grazing for his own stock. Grace took the livestock and the children to a nearby village, where she still lives, while her husband remained on the farm as a worker without his own stock. In the village the cattle died but the goats thrived. The children grew up with only intermittent contact with their father, who died on the farm.
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    TRANCRAA and communal land rights: Lessons from Namaqualand
    (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2003) Wisborg, Poul; Rohde, Rick
    The Transformation of Certain Rural Areas Act, Act 94 of 1998 (TRANCRAA) is the first comprehensive legislation to reform communal land tenure in South Africa. It aims to transfer land in 23 former coloured rural areas to residents or accountable local institutions. The TRANCRAA process in Namaqualand holds lessons for wider processes of tenure reform, including the implementation of the proposed Communal Land Rights Act. This policy brief argues that the time, funding and institutional support required to carry out tenure reform have been seriously under-estimated, and that reformed tenure rights are ineffective and vulnerable if isolated from other entitlements such as training, finance and integrated development initiatives. A neo-liberal assumption that property rights and markets by themselves will transform rural areas where people are in deep crisis due to unemployment, corruption, food insecurity and HIV/Aids is ill-founded and dangerous.