Several former and current officials in the land department complain of a culture of patronage where favours are meted out to “Luthuli House comrades-in-farms” and orders are issued to officials to carry them out in flagrant violation of government policy.
“The dream was to build a farm that would be a model of black farming excellence with farm workers and others in the valley.”
But the vineyards on Nirwanda are buckled and gnarled. There will be no harvest this year, or possibly even next.This once-flourishing, state-owned farm should have been one of land reform’s success stories; instead, it has become an emblem of its failures. The roots of its rot are allegedly located at the door of the department of rural development and land reform — which is charged with gatekeeping land reform — in cahoots with an apparently unethical agribusiness.
“Billions of rands earmarked for the development of an agrarian economy have been squandered across all provinces,” says Ruth Hall, a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s land reform advisory panel and a professor at the University of the Western Cape’s Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. The panel was appointed in December 2018 to research the problems of land reform. Her findings point to a shocking scenario of the capture of land reform by the elite.
This alleged corruption has been the focus of a four-year investigation by SABC current affairs programmeThe elite’s capture of land reform dates back to the early 2000s but seems to have spiked between 2009 and 2018, when Jacob Zuma became president, and Gugile Nkwinti was appointed minister of rural development.
This practice is not exclusive to the multinational but, from the findings of an incriminating forensic investigation conducted in 2016, Safe has perpetrated the flipping formula on farms countrywide, allegedly ploughing very little capital into the farms and allegedly swindling the intended beneficiaries, while making huge profits from the export of the produce to overseas outlets.
As official documents confirm, the Big Five was formally approved as the Nirwanda lessees in July 2013 by the National Land Allocation and Recapitalisation Control Committee. But, six years later, they still have no lease, no government funding, the farm has been vandalised and the vineyards are damaged.
When approached for comment in January this year, Safe replied: “Re your questions to Safe. Safe declines to comment.” Subsequent requests for comment have been ignored. Luphungela has since left the department and joined Nkwinti, who, in January 2018, was appointed water and sanitation minister. Neither he nor Nkwinti have responded to requests for interviews, despite requests for comment going all the way back to 2016.The most damning findings against the multinational are contained in a forensic report that was conducted into Nirwanda during 2016.
Hall laments: “Valuable vineyards worth tens of millions of rand are going down the drain.” This is despite the beneficiaries having the skills to turn things around, she says. “What they are desperately in need of is proper government support to make the farm productive again.” “Accountability for these scandals lies at the highest levels of the department,” says Bongo. “Instead, we have become collateral damage in one of the biggest travesties of post-apartheid South Africa.”
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