Mohamed Ameen Dabhelia – 2018/03/06

South Africa’s newly elected President, Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced  that the “ruling party must move ahead with land expropriation without compensation because of a ‘pressing’ and ‘urgent’ hunger for farming land among South Africans.”

However, a report by the South African Institute for Race Relations contradicts Ramaphosa’s statements, claiming that “comprehensive opinion polls commissioned by them between 2015 and 2017 have repeatedly shown that the great majority of black South Africans have little interest in land reform”.

The IRR’s Michael Morris told Radio Islam that the results of the poll are striking and counter intuitive.

“Given the sort of level and debate and the claim that are made about Cyril Ramaphosa claiming that there is an urgent hunger for land reform.”

According to the report, “in the 2016 field survey, only 1% of black respondents (down from 2% the previous year) said that ‘more land reform’ was the ‘best way to improve lives’. By contrast, 73% of black people saw ‘more jobs and better education’ as the ‘best way’ for them to get ahead.”

The report adds that, “in similar vein, the 2017 field survey, only 1% of black respondents identified ‘speeding up land reform’ as a top priority for the government.”

Morris says that politicians are creating curious contradictions.

“It appears that the ANC is obsessed with unity at the moment, figures show that at national and local government elections, it’s lost more to its own splinter groups, and it’s obsessed with re-establishing that larger support base.”

Morris is of the opinion that even though Ramaphosa has the mandate to introduce policy reform, the party itself seems to be more concerned about consolidating unity.