Thread by @Richard_Spoor

One of the reasons for the violence around mining is insecure tenure for people living in the former bantustans. Despite decades of promises there has been no substantive reform. What little has been achieved has been achieved through the courts. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-0…

The Courts have spelled out the rights of communal land owning communities and processes that should be followed in the alienation of communal land. This has resulted in some key victories for well organised communities, but elsewhere the impact has been small.

Local chiefs and headmen, and in the case of KZN the Ngonyama Trust, still enjoy unconstrained power of over land paying scant regard to the guidance provided by the courts. Absent a strong and organised community they are free to allocate community land to cronies as they will.

The result of this lawless and corrupt dispossession of people’s land invariably leads to violence by both the dispossessors and the dispossessed. Troublesome people need to be dealt with through threats and violence and sometimes they fight back.

In a situation where there is secure tenure, land is leased or sold by formal written agreement between nominally equal parties. Violence and duress are rare exceptions. It’s the absence of a coherent legal framework and access to peaceful remedies that leads to violence.

The State, hostage as it is to the political support of the rural elites who exercise such disproportionate power over the land of others, has failed to take the legislative measures required to reign these elites in and to secure peace and good order for the benefit of the poor.