Abstract:
Under the nuance environment of a shift from government to governance, the
liberationist-democratic dispensation together with the constitutional guarantees
of property ownership meant that multiple actors, inclusive of private commercial
interests, would partake in the land reform processes. As a result, large tracks of
land that previously produced crops for food were turned into nature reserves
in order to escape the anticipated reforms as part of the protected areas under
the United Nations conventions, thereby undermining the possibility of rural
communities in tribal settlements accessing productive arable lands. In essence,
there is evidence that the construct of governance under South Africa’s democratic
experimentation is steeply infused with the virtues of private rather than public
ownership as well as contestations of efficacy at the expense of public good of
formerly disadvantaged tribal settlement communities. To that extent, the dearth of
governance of communal land is central to the lapse of its productivity relative to
that contracted to private commercial interests. This article corroborates the notion
that the broader political-economy of governance is inherently biased against poor
communities at the local scale of rural tribal settlements. The states experimenting
with democratic dispensation, following years of colonialism and apartheid such as
South Africa, have inevitably appeared to collude in establishing liberal constitutional
and institutional frameworks that favour the private interests at the expense of
the general citizenry. This article argues, instead, that a democratic South Africa’s land reform institutional frameworks together with the liberationist constitutional
governance have accentuated, let alone papering over, the longstanding politicale-conomy
inequities that were founded of racial spatialisation.
