Politics and agrarian capital in land restitution: the greater tenbosch strategic partnership in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

Abstract

The post-apartheid South African government is faced with an enormous unresolved task of implementing land restitution programme to address the challenge of historical injustices of land dispossession while achieving poverty amelioration, employment, and food security. The study explores the impacts of a state-led strategic partnership arrangement between a land restitution community called Siboshwa, which is part of South Africa’s biggest and most expensive land claim: The Greater Tenbosch land claim, and an agribusiness Rainbow Chicken Limited (RCL) Foods.The central research question is: How has the strategic partnership arrangement shaped social relations of property, power, and production on community-owned commercial farms, and to what ways do they impact livelihood strategies of land reform beneficiaries. The study is situated within agrarian political economy, which is concerned with long-term, historical patterns of structurally determined power relations amongst social groups, of processes of political and economic control by the state and powerful actors, as well as diverse patterns of production, investment, accumulation and reproduction across society. The study uses concepts drawn from the Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA), which emphasises analysing the role of policies, organizations, and institutions play in mediating access to livelihood resources, thus continuously defining and (re)shaping what is possible for whom. In efforts to foreground the underlying structural conditions that define social relations and assume a critical inquiry lens that probes beyond the surface level, I employed philosophical tenets and assumptions from Critical Realism which analyse the social relations that underpin social formations, modes of production, and societal reproduction chains. Data was collected through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods (mixed method approach) from Greater Tenbosch Land reform beneficiaries in the Nkomazi Local District and other key actors relating to the strategic parntership.