In Focus

Mantashe is wrong to describe land grabs as anarchy, says BLF

Mineral Resources Minister, Gwede Mantashe should not describe land occupations as anarchy because black people are the rightful owners of the land.

According to Black First Land First (BLF) Deputy President, Zanele Lwana, Mantashe does not “want to see the day that black people have land.”

Lwana was responding to utterances made by Mantashe at a land reform dialogue held at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg on 27 and 28 March 2018.

At the event, Mantashe called the recent wave of illegal land occupations in the country as “anarchy.”

“Anarchy must not be allowed too flourish. It must be dealt with, and we must allow law enforcement agencies to do their work,” he said.

Five people were arrested on 24 March 2018 outside the luxurious Waterfall estate in Midrand for attempting to illegally occupy land.

Another attempted land grab was halted by police in Hermanus in the Western Cape over the same weekend. The illegal occupation led to protests which resulted in several buildings being damaged including a police station and a community library.

Lwana says the BLF encourages its members and members of the wider community to occupy land on the basis that they are landless. She says, however, that this should be done through “organisational unity.”

On the recent motion passed by parliament to set up a committee that will look into amending the constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation, Lwana says that the African National Congress (ANC) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are playing “political football” with the lives of the majority.

The BLF and Lwana believe that land expropriation without compensation is unlikely to be done before the 2019 general elections as the ANC has been unsuccessful for the past 24 years to deliver on its promises.