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Johannesburg: South Africa, under pressure to redress land ownership imbalances left by apartheid, has expropriated its first farm in a reform drive aimed at returning land to the black majority, officials said yesterday.
The state-ordered sale of a farm in Northern Cape province marks a new phase in the contentious issue in South Africa, where the government has come under fire for moving too slowly to put land in black hands.
More than a decade after the end of apartheid, over 90 per cent of farmland is still owned by the white elite. Until now, the government has moved cautiously, careful not to rattle investor nerves given the chaos that accompanied a similar land redistribution process in neighbouring Zimbabwe.
But the government has recently hardened its stance, and officials said they would use the full power of post-apartheid laws which allow government to order land sales to speed up the process.
The first expropriation took effect on January 26, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said in a statement.
"I think it [the expropriation] is most significant. ... It [reform] is something that cannot lag forever," said Susan Booysen, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand.
"The nitty-gritty of each individual case is an incredible mine field government has to go through."
Restitution is part of South Africa's broader land reform programme and allows blacks, many of whom were evicted from ancestral lands, to apply to have their rights restored or to ask for financial compensation.
They can also seek government loans to purchase land.
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