Failing to learn from failed programmes: South Africa’s communal land rights bill (CLRB) - ASC Research Seminar

Samuel Kariuki (PhD, Wits), a Kenyan citizen resident in South Africa, is based at the Sociology Department of the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg). His 2003 PhD thesis is entitled ‘A Comparative Study of Land Reform Policy and Implementation Programme in Post-Independent Kenya (1963) and Post-Apartheid South Africa (1994)’. His current research is on post-1999 land reform policies in South Africa.

The current crisis in Zimbabwe has highlighted the urgency of the land issue in Southern Africa. This paper will focus on land reform in post-1999 South Africa as well as on the implications of the Zimbabwe crisis for the land question in South Africa.

The speaker will offer an explanatory review of the Communal Land Rights Bill (CLRB) initiated in February 2004. The cardinal objective of the CLRB was to legalize security of tenure in South Africa’s former homelands, home to a third of South Africa’s population (14 million of the total 43 million). The logic behind it is to realize more efficient land utilization and investment inflows to South Africa’s poorest regions (the former homelands) with recognized security of tenure. The paper will debunk some of the debates around indigenous/communal tenure systems vis-à-vis individual tenure systems with respect to their applicability to the ‘modernization’ impetus they are perceived to uphold. 
A second aim of the paper is to offer an evaluation of the bill. A textual and sociological critique of the bill will demonstrate its inappropriateness, especially in relation to the replacement paradigm it adopts and the administrative, resource and conflict-based challenges it is bound to encounter in its implementation. The speaker will argue that the bill is a-historical and fails to come to terms with the sociological complexity and uniqueness that defines South Africa’s rural societies with respect to land matters.