The government approved a women empowerment policy in 2020 proposing that about 50% of the allocation of agricultural farming land under the redistribution programme should be for women, 40% for youth, and 10% for people living with disabilities.
The National Policy on Beneficiary Selection and Land Allocation is an essential intervention as it outlines who should benefit from land redistribution. It is a corrective method that seeks to address the skewed land redistribution delivery that has historically favoured men and those with political connections.
While the origin of these ideas can be traced to the 1997 white paper on land reform, it was the presidential advisory panel on land reform & agriculture that sharpened the framework.
Appointed in September 2018, the panel comprised 10 members — five women and five men. It was chaired by a prominent woman, the late Vuyo Mahlathi. I was one of the five men. Our mandate was to provide a unified policy perspective on land reform regarding restitution, redistribution and tenure reform.
In responding to this call, it became clear that the lack of transparency and mechanisms for selecting who should benefit from land redistribution was among the areas where we needed to intervene. Hence our report, released in late 2019, recommended beneficiary selection criteria for the land redistribution pillar of land reform.
In our internal discussions the idea of the criteria was initially proposed by a subgroup I was in that included three other men: the late Mohammad Karaan, Dan Kriek and Nick Serfontein. But our conceptualisation provided guidelines for selecting a person with skills and youthfulness to run a farming enterprise. We did not reflect deeply on gender dynamics.
Strong case
Ruth Hall, Bulelwa Mabasa, Thandi Ngcobo, Thato Moagi and Mahlathi — the women on the panel — brought gender dynamics to the fore in the discussions. They followed up by convening a round table discussion on March 2019 to solicit women’s views on their plight regarding access to land, specifically in marginalised rural communities of SA.
In those discussions women shared lived experiences of how they lost their land after their husbands died, and the difficulties faced by unmarried women regarding access to land. These engagements are the reason the panel’s report made such a strong case for gender diversity.
After the cabinet approved the panel’s report in 2019, the government implemented some of the recommendations. The beneficiary selection criteria are what culminated in the current National Policy on Beneficiary Selection & Land Allocation, which guides land redistribution.
For example, of the 700,000ha of state land government announced would be released from October 2020, most beneficiaries should be women and youth, in line with the national policy.
This story highlights the importance of gender diversity, not only at general levels in the workplace but also in key policy-making spaces. It is possible that without the presence of these prominent women, the panel’s report would not have explored the plight of women to the same depth as we did.
Convert suggestions
For the sake of transparency, I can still remember the times when I argued that we should focus just on skills and age in our selection criteria. The wise Mahlathi would remind me: “Wandile, asiyibhaleli namhlanje le mithetho; sibhalela amangomso nezisukulwana”, loosely translated as “Wandile, we are not writing these policy suggestions for now, but for tomorrow’s and the next generation”.
The current youth and women, and hopefully the next generation, will benefit from the fruits of the foresight showed by the women on the panel who uplifted the plight of the poor and rural women on land matters. Thankfully, they had the ear of the president and minister to convert their suggestions into action.
The policy is indeed an honour to Mahlati and all the women on the panel who provided wisdom on the importance of the presence of women in the policy-creation process.
• Sihlobo (@WandileSihlobo) is chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of SA and author of Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity, and Agriculture. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand.
