Hi, welcome to my Poliseries: an exploration of the vision each parliamentary party has for South Africa’s future. The topic I explore in this regard is land reform. In this report, I discuss the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Drawing its name from the ‘Inkatha Zului KaZulu’, a Zulu conference founded by King Solomon KaDinuzulu in 1928 to promote African values systems using strategies and activities guided by the ubuntu principle, the IFP was founded, first as Inkatha YeSizwe, by the King’s nephew: Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi together with others in 1975. Prince Buthelezi’s leadership exhibited his uncle’s commitment to ubuntu when he deflected the IFP towards an approach different to the then ANC’s armed struggle against Apartheid during the 1980s.
Installing the Prince as its formal leader in 1990, the IFP has come to consider itself a middle-ground between two extremes: centralized socialism as sought after by the ANC and EFF; and liberal capitalism as sought after most notably by the DA – a ’best of both worlds’ so-to-speak. Heavily rooted in its commitment to Ubuntu, the IFP regards this middle-ground as an environment constituted by a combination of predominantly free individual self-responsibility, limited only by a shared burden that is social responsibility: the role that all individuals must play, as members of the collective, through their daily interactions to help facilitate the realization of one another’s full potential. Such an environment, as acknowledged by the party, must be grounded in truth; which means, coming to terms with our present to deal with the challenges of our past – for, what is truth if not the equalisation of present and past? Thus, it supports the expropriation of land without compensation, which it regards as promoting the spirit of ubuntu in espousing delivering justice and morality for all.
“The resolution of the vs issue carries with it the promise of healing the wounds of the past”.
- IFP 2019 Election Manifesto
The rest of its land reform policies hit the same beats as one or more of the parties previously discussed: food security, with a heavy focus on training, land tenure and extension services support; forestry, with a commercial aspect that is to include rural communities who would be supported, via extension services, by the IFP government to use their land for the commercial exploitation of control-planted man-made forests. This, together with the rapid privatisation of the industrial forestry sector it prefers, paints a colourful picture of entrepreneurship, job creation and economic development. Or is it another classist division of production as seen in the agriculture industry? Subsistence vs commercial forestry? In agriculture, as the DA envisioned it, the setup was that rural subsistence farmers feed themselves and their communities while commercial farmers fed themselves and urban areas. The IFP, with regards to forestry, seeks a similar setup in which rural subsistence foresters supply small businesses in their communities. Considering economies of scale based on the differences in land quality and size between the two sides of the economic divide, I see a continued perpetuation of land-based inequality in the country.
What surprises me is the party’s intended reliance on traditional leaders for the administration of communal land; that is, despite problems surrounding their abuse of power in this regard.
“The land of traditional communities should be seen as already perfectly allocated and should not be part of the land programs aimed at redistribution and restitution.”
- IFP Website
It seems to me that the materialization of the IFP’s vision dooms those living on communal land, and their descendants, to continue existing as subjects whose security, in financial and physical terms, is fully exposed to the whims of their ‘lords’. To its credit, the party does address my concern, somewhat, by advocating for the acknowledgement of all forms of tenure, specifically citing that of communal land dwellers; but without going into further detail, I wonder how it is to negotiate for traditional leaders to relinquish that aspect of their power.
Traditional leaders are to be further empowered in their roles as communal land administrators under an IFP government as it aims to further legitimise them by establishing a direct link between them and national government; rather than amending indigenous or customary laws to oversee traditional leaders indirectly, national laws to regulate them directly will be promulgated thereby effectively co-opting/integrating them into governmental structures. I doubt that, by then, there would much difference, in power, between them and the mayors of towns /cities.
An IFP government would allow its provincial constituents room to deal with their respective areas’ land demands distinctively. It would not force upon them one standardised approach. With this, I agree, as a good idea – especially when applied to local officials voted into their positions by their fellow community members. As far as traditional leaders are concerned, they are not voted for thus their use of said freedom to deal with land claims and applications at their discretion without oversight by their ‘subjects’ is a recipe for disaster.
Sharing the goal to revert apartheid’s spatial planning with the GOOD party, the IFP takes a different path and chooses to have the underprivileged retain their dignity by allowing us to work ourselves out of our poverty and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps; assuming, as aside from land restitution claimants, those who require housing will be expected to work for it, accumulate their savings as best they can and their efforts will be bolstered by a government grant to get them in reach of the price of a reasonable quality home. To this end, and per their desire to localise land reform decision making, they plan to embed housing support centres within communities. I imagine these as places where community members go to apply for the said grant and receive additional relevant services to realise their dreams; a great way of getting feet on the ground and establishing direct contact with community members to deal with their issues with minimal bureaucratic delay.
However, I fear that the value of this approach cannot go beyond its paper form; the delegation of decision-making power from national structures onto those provincial, although a step in the right direction, is, in my view, window dressing. Consider the relationship between parliament, the judiciary and the presidency, all pillars of our democracy meant to be independent of each other but, practically, share interconnecting strings which some would argue are necessary for the real-world materialization of an idealistic concept. Another example is the objectivity of journalism, another ideal concept that remains ignorant of the true nature of reality, that, at many levels, all things are connected to all people and all people are, in turn, interdependent. With that said, just how much autonomy can the IFP government offer its provincial arms when, in reality, their self-responsibility will always be protected by that of a more unidentifiable national entity?
People need a more localized government for them to unlock the full potential of their communities. Communities governed by their members who have full self-responsibility thus autonomy from the national government in decision-making automatically become part of their governing process. Their role: to hold accountable their local officials. A role they can effectively fulfil since those officials can no longer hide behind ‘foreign’ powers by blaming their actions on the agency of unknown distant actors. My concern with the IFP’s approach here is that provincial structures under their government, regardless of the degree of autonomy they receive, can always hide behind their titles as deployees. And, adding onto such a mess of a bureaucratic structure these housing support centres, even with more localised community contact, will do little to no difference – I argue that it would make worse an already bad situation. A similar structure to what they propose here is that deployed by the health department: clinics are embedded in most communities, yet the level of service delivered throughout is slow and inefficient as shown by the numerous queues that are often found spilling outside their doors.
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