land

A non-governmental organisation dealing in land issues on Zambia’s Copperbelt has accused Kitwe City Council of advertising already sold plots.

Copperbelt Indigenous Land Rights Network executive director, Archie Mulunda, says the Kitwe City Council recently advertised to sale residential plots which had already been sold to some corporate institutions and a few elites at the expense of poor people who also needed to acquire plots.

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform is working on policies and guidelines on how to reopen land claims to redress the inequalities of the past.
 
Chief director of the Gauteng Shared Services Centre, Rachel Masango, states that a total of 313 properties have been acquired through the land reform programme in Gauteng since 1994.
 

According to a non-governmental organisation, Survival International, three Khoisan children have been arrested by paramilitary police in Botswana.

The children, who were arrested for being in possession of antelope meat in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, have since been released, but further reports of harassment and intimidation have surfaced, and there have been a growing number of Khoisan arrests.

Four land rights activists have appeared in court after being arrested during farmworker protests in the Western Cape.

Mercia Andrews, Denia Jansen, Margaret Visser and Riaan Willemse, of the Mawubye Land Rights Forum, face charges of incitement, intimidation and participating in an illegal gathering.

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) says that a court order has halted the demolition of houses in Lenasia illegally erected on land owned by the City of Johannesburg.
 
SAHRC spokesperson, Isaac Mangena, points out that the South Gauteng High Court granted the commission's application, and suspended the demolitions for at least 24 hours.
 
Mangena states that, "The court is also granting the department an opportunity to respond to the commission's application which will be heard on Tuesday [13 November 2012]."
 

President Jacob Zuma has reiterated his support for the campaign that encourages South Africans to productively use the land to improve food security for millions of citizens.

Zuma states that in order to reduce food insecurity in rural areas, government is promoting food gardens and other forms of subsistence agriculture, involving civil society.

He stresses the importance of people going back to the land and not to view social grants, wage employment and non-agricultural informal activities as the only source of income for rural households.

Rural Development and Land Reform Minister, Gugile Nkwinti, has urged black farmers who received land through the government’s various redistribution and restitution programmes to enter into a formal performance contract with the state.

Addressing a two-day recapitalisation and development evaluation workshop in Boksburg, Nkwinti, who explained the terms and conditions of the contracts, explained that the contracts will enable them to obtain resources and expert advice to help them become successful farmers.

AgriSA says transferring land ownership from tribal authorities to the people who live there could help create wealth.

Speaking at a discussion hosted by the FW de Klerk Foundation on the recent African National Congress policy conference in Johannesburg, AgriSA deputy president, Theo de Jager, said that this could enable more than 22 million people to own something that they could develop and sell.

A recently released report has found that financial compensation for land restitution is mostly well-spent, despite misgivings by the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights.

The report, ‘Paying for the Past: Addressing Past Property’, has found that in about 30 percent of the cases, the restitution award did produce ‘a substantial economic benefit’.

According to Professor Bernadette Atuahene, who prepared the report, the majority of these people spent their financial award on improving their current homes, to increase the value of their primary assets.