Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture

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20 عاما من العطاء و الصمود
مكتبة سودانيزاونلاين
Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture

    Back to ENTABENI: Accelerating land and agrarian transformation in South Africa
    1 October 2004 - University of Fort Hare

    By Blade Nzimande, SACP General Secretary

    (NOTE - delivered as main address of the Inaugural Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture hosted by the University of Fort Hare as part of the University's Inaugural Colloquium on Africa Intellectual Project with the theme of "The Land and the Agrarian Question in Africa in the 21st Century". The Colloquim also had academic papers from progressive intellectuals from Botswana, Namibia, Cape Verde, Zimbabwe and South Africa.)

    Mr Vice-Chancellor, our stalwart and former Premier of Eastern Cape Cde Raymond Mhlaba, members of Council present, professors and academic staff of UFH, distinguished international guests and scholars, students and workers at UFH, community and political leaders, distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman and comrades.

    I am honoured by the invitation to address such a distinguished gathering in one of our premier universities for the first Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture. The topic I am addressing, in line with our Red October Campaign is that of the challenge of accelerating land and agrarian transformation in our country.

    Many people might ask how is the name of Cde Joe Slovo associated with land and agrarian studies and struggles? In any case, the argument might be made, was Joe Slovo not at best a strategist on urban guerilla warfare and the mobilization of the urban working class to fight the apartheid regime? Even when he was Minister of Housing, the biggest challenge for housing in South Africa is in the urban areas?

    The first characteristic about Cde Joe Slovo was that he was a fighter for the workers and the poor, both urban and rural. Slovo was in the first instance a communist, a strategist and a fine Marxist-Leninist Theoretician. He understood our revolution not as a fragmented project, but a holistic struggle aimed at emancipating our people as a whole, both in the urban and rural areas. He was also acutely aware of the revolutionary potential of the rural masses. In one of his earlier writings "The armed struggle spreads" in 1968, Slovo was greatly impressed by the revolutionary potential of the rural masses in Southern and South Africa:

    And what of the people in the countryside, which is the focal point of guerilla activity in the initial stages? Here too there is convincing evidence of a peasantry which despite centuries of intensive repression, lacks submissiveness. In the very recent past and in many important areas it has demonstrated a capacity for action to the point of armed resistance. In Sekhukhuniland in the late 1950s the peasantry, partly armed, doggedly resisted the attempts by the authorities to replace the traditional leaders of the people with government appointed servants, so-called Bantu Authorities. In Zululand similar resistance was encountered.

    He was however most impressed by the Pondo revolt in the Transkei (which our other leader and revolutionary intellectual, Govan Mbeki had written extensively about):

    The most intense point of the peasant resistance and upsurge was amongst the Pondo in the Transkei. By March 1960 a vast popular movement had arisen, unofficial administrative units were set up including people's courts. From the chosen spots in the mountains where thousands of peasants assembled illegally came the name of the movement - INTABA - The Mountain. Although this revolt had its origin in local grievances, the aim of the resistance soon became the attainment of basic political ends and it came to adopt the full programme of the ANC

    Of course, as Slovo himself was aware, the creation of the Bantustans, with a collaborative bureaucratic bourgeoisie at the helm, the arming of white farmers and their being drawn into the apartheid regime's state security apparatuses, and the general intensified repression, rolled back and defeated these nascent rural revolts.

    As we have pointed out before if the primary challenge of the first ten years of our democracy was to build new democratic institutions, stabilize that democracy and lay the basis for effective poverty eradication. The most critical challenge for the second decade of our freedom is socio-economic transformation to change the lives of millions of the poor of our country. The transformation of the countryside is an absolute priority in this regard.

    This initiative by the UFH, together with our Red October campaign, can be seen as a return to INTABA. Let me therefore congratulate the University of Fort Hare for this initiative as well as the SACP in the Eastern Cape. Let me also take this opportunity to thank Helena Dolny, Cde Joe Slovo's widow, for her support for this lecture and the possible establishment of a programme on Land and Agrarian Studies in future.

    But what is this INTABA in the present conjuncture and the challenges facing this pilgrimage?

    On the land and agrarian question

    Like the rest of the South African economy, the accumulation regime in agriculture has not fundamentally changed over the last ten years. Indeed, South Africa's agriculture and its accumulation regime still represent some of the worst features of the political economy of land and agriculture under apartheid.

    Our countryside provides a stark insight into the enclave character of our economy. Apart from the two distinct urban/rural enclaves in our economy, South Africa's countryside is in itself divided into two very distinct enclaves shaped over more than a century of proletarianisation of the black rural masses and the massive land dispossession of the majority by both the colonial and apartheid regimes. The one enclave is that of the former Bantustans, and the other is that dominated by agri-business and small and medium sized farms, owned in the main by white farmers and/or their families.

    The 'white' countryside

    The South African agricultural economy is dominated by large agri-business companies that span the entire production process and marketing. This economy, however, underwent massive changes after the 1973 global economic crisis. It embarked on large-scale mechanisation and increasing export orientation resulting in, amongst other things, massive retrenchments and the eviction of black farm workers. However, the process of evictions had already started in the earlier decades of the 1950s and 60s, as the apartheid regime reconfigured the racial landscape of South Africa in line with what later became the "Group Areas".

    Liberalisation and export orientation of commercial agriculture has deepened rather than lessened post 1994, thus ensuring the growing dominance of agribusiness and very minimal opportunities for the emergence of new, particularly small and co-operative, farming. Government's economic policies seem to have strengthened rather than transformed this accumulation regime since 1994. For example, according to South African Standard Industry Database, as cited in the Human Development Report, 2003, the real profit rate of agriculture, forestry and fishing rose from 100 in 1995 to 143 in 2002. This increased this industry's share of total profits from 67,8% in 1995 to 72,7% in 2002. Labour productivity in this industry rose from 123,6 in 1996 to 151,9 with an average annual growth rate of 3,26 in 2002.

    Despite this performance in agriculture, forestry and fishery, black, mainly African, farmworkers have suffered greatly and have borne most of the brunt of the continuing accumulation regime in agriculture. They still represent what is, perhaps, the most exploited section of South Africa's working class. For instance, this industry's share of total employment declined from 10,7 in 1996 to 9,9% in 2002. The wage share by this industry has further declined from 32,2% in 1995 to 27,3% in 2002.

    A further reality in the agricultural sector is that what we have on commercial farms is not just workers but families on farms. Not only are these workers being paid starvation wages, but they are, in many instances together with their families, daily subjected to all forms of abuse including violence. Some of these abuses include the following:


    Long working hours that are not compensated
    Impounding of their livestock by farmers. In fact the fines imposed on impounded livestock are deducted from their wages, as part of the many deductions made by farmers from the new statutory wage, thus continuing to pay the workers the same old slaveges
    Less than human living conditions
    No access to basic services like water, electricity and sanitation
    Widespread violence as a routine form of discipline and including murders. This is complicated by an untransformed justice system that does not even take up those cases that are reported to them against white farmers
    Even where one would have thought that the black majority has some potential relative advantage, the accumulation regime and political economy of our countryside remains heavily skewed in favour of some 46 000, predominantly white owners. For example it is estimated that anything up to 43-47% of all cattle in South Africa, about 12% of sheep, and 60% of goats, are owned by the black, and predominantly African population, and yet this section of our people only produce 5% of all red meat in South Africa. One critical factor here is the lack of grazing land for the black population and the necessary agricultural inputs and support for successful livestock farming.

    Since 1994, our government has made a number of interventions in the agricultural economy. Some of these include the land redistribution and restitution, legislation on security of tenure, significant labour market reforms including minimum conditions of service, the Agricultural Credit Scheme to assist small-scale farming and the AgriBEE Charter. The constraints of a memorial lecture do not allow me to focus in any detail on all of these measures, and I will therefore just briefly focus on two of them.

    Land redistribution and restitution - The flagship of government's land and agrarian reform has been land reform and land restitution. This has seen some land being transferred to the majority of our people. The RDP had set a target of redistributing 30% of land during the first five years of the land redistribution programme. However, government has distributed about 2,1 million hectares through non-restitution programmes, plus about 810 282 through restitution, bringing total land redistribution to just under 3 million hectares. This constitutes less than 3% of productive land. This means that only 14% of the land is in the hands of African people. Agricultural land is concentrated in the hands of an estimated 46 000 corporate and individual owners, who are predominantly white. However, a fundamental problem in land redistribution, through land reform and restitution is that most of the land being transferred is not being used for agricultural purposes as this programme is not accompanied by provision of agricultural inputs (seeds, implements and agricultural skills development and support services). Furthermore the "willing buyer, willing seller" model is a major obstacle to acceleration of land reform, and there is widespread evidence of inflation of land prices by white farmers. In short, the process of land and agrarian reform is moving too slowly, hence the government's recent release of an AgriBEE Charter, of which a bit more about below. The fundamental problem here is the seeming disjuncture between land and agricultural transformation.
    AgriBEE Charter - We have generally welcomed the recent publication of a draft agricultural charter as emphasising the urgency of land and agrarian transformation and as a useful pressure point on capital. However, the draft has some sers limitations. It is silent about the role of farm workers and the poor in the development and discussion of the charter, thus the process likely to be dominated and led by white private agricultural capital. We need to ensure that the voice of the workers and the poor is heard in the development and finalisation of the AgriBEE Charter.
    However, significant as these reforms and interventions are, they have not fundamentally (or even remotely) transformed the current accumulation regime and the political economy of the countryside. Class relations still remain the same. Agriculture in general, and small and medium farmers in particular, represent some of the most backward sections of capital in South Africa, and the one most strenuously resisting transformation of the countryside. In short the willing-buyer, willing-seller market based model has not worked! We have an urgent task of developing alternative models to this, and also learn from other experiences, a task that an institution like UFH can contribute towards.

    We should however not blame government alone for all these weaknesses, rather to also work towards the building of social motive forces for rural transformation. The principal weakness remains the absence of progressive motive forces for transformation in this white countryside, particularly the lack of organisation of farm workers.

    Perhaps the biggest weakness is absence of an industrial strategy for agriculture, and this matter seems not to enjoy equal attention (as shown by the GDS) as modern manufacturing and services sectors, again partly a reflection of lack of strong organisation and voice for the workers and the poor. For example according to NALEDI figures only about 200 000 of the estimated 1,2 million farmworkers are organised into trade unions, with a whopping 1million unorganised!

    The former Bantustans

    The vast majority of the rural population in South Africa is located in the former Bantustans. In most of this territory our people are subjected to the rule, authority and patronage networks of the system of traditional leadership. There are very minimal accumulation processes of any significance taking place here. However this does not mean there is no accumulation at all, and perhaps the very minimal accumulation taking place needs to be looked at closely as a possible springboard to create sustainable rural livelihoods in the former Bantustans. The population in the former Bantustans still occupies a structural location of being dumping grounds for those who can't find employment or eke a living on the fringes of the urban economy. (Though they are now largely a permanently unemployed section of our population).

    Cousins and Lahiff (of the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape) cite figures that 80% of income in rural areas comes from wages, mostly remittances from the urban areas. Pensions are the second most important source of income, contributing between 10% and 20%. The third is income from some sort of agricultural activity, also estimated at about 10 and 25% in some areas.

    Yet there are very real possibilities to generate some form of accumulation in these areas, given a systematic focus and strategy. For example the livestock in the hands of many rural families, as highlighted above, is something that can be used as a basis for generating some sustainable income and an accumulation process to fight poverty. Cousins and Lahiff say studies reveal that in parts of the former Bantustans in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo virtually every household has access to some land for agricultural purposes. This reality perhaps strengthens our case for a systematic and focused strategy to promote household based subsistence farming. Zimbabwe, between 1980 and 1995 adopted a deliberate strategy to support small and subsistence farmers thus this layer of farmers becoming the major producer of maize in Zimbabwe.

    Government has also made some significant policy and legislative interventions in this enclave of the rural economy since 1994. Some of these include social grants for the poor, new policy framework on traditional leaders, integrated rural development and public works programmes.

    Our new democratic constitutional dispensation, principally the establishment of wall-to-wall municipal government, is an important advance towards liberating our people from Bantustan administrations, the apartheid repressive rural structures and the undiluted rule of traditional leaders. The extension of social grants to children, the disabled and additional elderly people is perhaps the most significant intervention government has made to alleviate rural poverty, particularly in the former Bantustans. This has cushioned the mass of the rural people from the worst forms of poverty. Without these grants the situation in these former Bantustans would clearly be ten times worse

    The government's approach to traditional leaders can at best be described as contradictory. Whilst the Traditional Leaders Act seem to have accommodated traditional leaders as subsidiary structures of the elected local municipalities, the Community Land Rights Act, gives these traditional leaders immense power over matters of land control and administration. This latter Act has the potential to undermine the democratisation process in the former Bantustans and the empowerment of the overwhelming majority of the rural masses, particularly rural women.

    The integrated rural development programme has been one of the most significant interventions by government. However, there is very little extensive evaluation done on the impact of these on rural poverty, and the picture seems to be very uneven. Some of the questions we need to pose is whether this programme is fundamentally based on transforming the accumulation regime in the countryside, both in the major agricultural sectors and the former Bantustans?

    Some of the key political challenges

    We believe our perspectives and campaigns provide a key platform to achieve our key strategic objectives in the transformation of our countryside, including the following key goals:

    The need for an overarching rural development strategy to bridge the divide between the 'white' countryside and the former Bantustans, grounded in accelerating land and agrarian transformation
    That the basis of such an industrial strategy for the countryside should be accelerated access to productive land for household based subsistence in both, and cutting across, the dualistic rural economic enclaves.
    Crucial in all this is the mobilisation of the social motive forces for transformation, principally farm-workers, the poor and agricultural co-operatives and other forms of small-scale farming. On our side we will ensure that we mobilize our communiti- building people's land committees to drive land and agrarian transformation, and your programme will hopefully establish a permanent dialogue and interaction with such people's initiatives
    It is because of these challenges that our Red October Campaign this year has three central demands:

    Access to productive land for household based subsistence, small scale farming and agricultural co-operatives
    Farmworkers' rights and access to basic services
    A national land summit, possibly preceded by provincial summits, to evaluate the first ten years of land reform, set a programme for its accelaration and for the voice of the workers and rural poor be heard
    This we are going to do by convening farmworkers' forums, rural people's tribunals, marches and demonstrations, principally targetted at commercial agriculture, culminating in a national day of action on 30 October 2004. Some of the outcomes we want from this campaign, which will go beyond October, is the building of people's land committees made up of farmworkers, agricultural co-operatives, small farmers and generally the rural poor. It is clear to us that unless the rural people are organised to take up their own problems, land and agrarian reform will be postponed forever.

    Given what the media tends to highlight about South Africa's countryside, one would think that the biggest rural challenge in South Africa is the constitutional rights of traditional leaders and the violence directed against white farmers. Yet the reality is the exact opposite, that the fundamental challenge is poverty for the overwhelming majority of our rural population and the pervasive violence experienced by farmworkers in the hands of the white farmers!

    Some of the academic/intellectual challenges in land and agrarian reform in South Africa

    I understand UFH wants to establish a land and agrarian studies programme. We welcome this and can only encourage this, and pledge our support to such an initiative. I would like to end this lecture by posing some of the challenges that would face such a programme both at this institution and in South African academia as a whole.

    The challenge is to establish progressive land and agrarian studies programmes, geared towards advancing the interests of the workers and the poor. In honour of a hero like Joe Slovo and many others, a Marxist theoretical framework should also inform h programmes. This has tended to take a back seat in our institutions of higher education since 1994. This is not just an ideological choice, but it is the only method that can help us understand the class, national and gender character of the countryside, thus helping to obviate appropriate strategies towards a land and agrarian transformation programme that can truly benefit the workers and the poor.
    To study closely the fundamental challenge of land and agrarian reform in South Africa today. Some of the priorities should include study and policy analysis of the feasibility of household based subsistence farming and building of agricultural co-opeives, access to micro-credit for agriculture, strategies for providing the necessary agricultural inputs for small-scale farming, and agricultural support services to small-scale and household based farming.
    Whilst given your location you can use the Eastern Cape as your laboratory as it were, we would expect UFH to build itself into a leading South African and continental institution on land and agrarian studies in favour of workers and the poor.
    Need to develop a model of an open programme of studies, both academic and community based, also aiming to support and strengthen community initiatives to access productive land to fight poverty. These are of course not necessarily new experiences, bueveral of our universities have experimented with such programmes in the past and in the present period, including UFH itself.
    If a key political challenge in the countryside is the building of social motive forces for rural transformation, we also need intellectual motive forces for such a task. This means that one of the key challenges of land and agrarian studies in South ica is to produce progressive, particularly black and women intellectuals, researchers and policy analysts, understanding and committed to transformation of the land and agrarian landscape for the benefit of the workers and the poor.
    For such a programme to fulfill this mission it has to be multidisciplinary in order to produce a student and community activist who understands the totality of the challenge for land and agrarian transformation in our country. It also means challengithe dominant paradigm of agricultural studies in South Africa, which focuses largely on training functionaries for capitalist commercial agriculture with little understanding of the location and potential of the mass of the rural poor in transforming their own conditions through agricultural activity. In particular, attention has to be paid to strengthening the activities of the thousands of women headed household in the rural areas, by supporting the role of women in agriculture and understanding and seek to transform the gender dimension of the countryside.
    Effective engagement with governments' Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme (ISRDP), so that the UFH programme can both benefit and inform such a programme. This will require creative engagement with the democratic state and some of its grammes, especially at local and provincial levels. This would also break what seems to be an assumption that the relationship between academics/intellectuals and the state should always be a hostile relationship. Some have come to define academic freedom and independence to mean a permanent hostile and oppositionist criticism of the state. Whilst any academic institution or programme must develop a critical engagement and assessment with the state this should not imply a hostile relationship. Debate and critical engagement is a healthy phenomenon, and not necessarily in contradiction with co-operation.
    The need to link with other fellow African countries' experiences, learn from both the successes and failures
    Most importantly the need to open a critical dialogue and engagement between the mass movement, the democratic state and academics/intellectuals. One of the key partners here should be the Chris Hani Institute - an autonomous progressive institute aimat becoming a think tank to promote the interests of the workers and the poor in society.
    The establishment of a scholarship programme for poor students to study progressive land and agrarian studies at this institution and beyond.
    With these words, our 2004 Red October Campaign is launched! Mawubuye Umhlaba! Masibuyele Entabeni!

    I thank you

                  

العنوان الكاتب Date
Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture شبشة10-12-04, 05:40 AM
  Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture Suad I. Ahmed10-12-04, 06:12 AM
  Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture شبشة10-14-04, 04:36 AM
    Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture Tanash10-14-04, 07:39 AM
  Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture abdalla BABIKER10-14-04, 08:19 AM
    Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture Adil Ali10-14-04, 01:41 PM
      Re: Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture Adil Ali10-16-04, 12:53 PM


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