By: Lindokuhle Mnisi
Introduction
The
Republic of South Africa is a country that has a very unfortunate history, a
history of colonialism, oppression and discrimination against one another. This
history dates back to almost 400 years ago when the country experienced
colonialism from the white people who came from all over the world, to take
over everything that belonged to the indigenous people of this land. Wars
erupted, and the unfortunate apartheid regime also commenced in the country
with those white people claiming ownership of this land, and black people
having to defend what they thought belonged to them.
Policies
were created to defend and suite certain groups of people, while other policies
were made to oppress a certain class of people. The Land act of 1913 can be an
example of those policies that were created by the apartheid government. This
act’s main aim was to separate people according to their race, with black
people being given at least 7% of land in their own country and pushed away to
homelands, while white people occupied the bigger piece of the
country. The Act created a system of land tenure that deprived the
majority of South Africa's inhabitants of the right to own land which had major
socio-economic repercussions.
There
were other policies that were created in the past which includes education,
crime, economic and housing policies. But when apartheid was defeated in the
1990s, many of those policies were reviewed and some were redrafted to address
the issues of balance and equality in the country. With the legacy of
apartheid, some of those policies didn’t manage to address the key challenges
of South Africa. Those policies are, at some point, the challenges in the
country as they try to solve problems while being a problem themselves.
Groups
of individuals merged to form solid forces to defeat apartheid, but when they
had to defeat the legacy of the system they decided to separate and fight one
another. The “winning team” went from being a liberation fighter to a political
party. The African National Congress, as a governing party since 1994, drafted
a number of policies that aimed at suiting the majority inhabitant of the
republic and addressing the imbalances of the past (affirmative action). But it
turned out that those policies were a fair to a certain extent, fair to certain
individuals and unfair to the others.
There
are policies and approaches like “willing buyer, willing seller” which was
aiming at redistributing land to the inhabitants of South Africa, but didn’t
really work to address the challenges of land in the country. The majority of
land belonged to the minority (whites) and historical facts prove that the land
was forcefully taken away from the majority (blacks). The government and the
leading political party also agreed that this approach didn’t work and was not
going to work and the minority continued to own bigger pieces of land. The
ANCYL under the leadership of the expelled leader Julius Malema pushed for
“redistribution of land without compensation” and received the highest level of
criticism for those utterances. Some said he was being racist, but all those
who said that, didn’t really have a better solution to the issue of
redistribution of land.
Solutions
to Land Reform policy would be to know the reason for redistribution, not to do
it to spite the white people who used to own it, but to render services to the
people and help in the development of the economy.
In
the ANC’s Land Reform Policy Discussion Document of June 2012, they said Land
Reform is not just another social transfer where benefiting citizens receive
government largesse. It is and should be seen as autonomy-fostering service
delivery. This view of land reform projects service delivery as a key site at
which the assumptions and stigmas associated with vulnerability in our society
may be challenged and the appropriate resources for developing the capacity for
autonomy provided. Service delivery via land reform should play an important
role in clearing the way for disadvantaged previously marginalized individuals
to exercise their capacity to act autonomously, to be full economic and social
participants in the South African Project. - (ANC.org.za, Policy Documents)
Housing
Policy & strategy
Economic
policy
"It
is an integrated and coherent political process. It is located within the
context of the country's nation transformation programme, namely the RDP
(Reconstruction and Development Programme). It is aimed at change the
imbalances of the past by seeking to substantially transfer and confer
ownership, management and control of South Africa's financial and economic
resources to the majority of the citizens. It seeks to ensure broader and
meaningful participation in the economy by black people to achieve sustainable
development and prosperity." (BEE
Commission Report, pg. 2)
Mineral
Policy (Mining)
NB:
This piece was written as an assignment for Politics 3.