COMMENT , by Pete Bower
GAUTENG
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 18 No 2 February 2017 PUBLISHED BY Bowford Publications ( Pty ) Ltd Established 1985
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FRONT COVER
Small , hardy and easy to keep , Dexters are the ideal cattle for smallholders .
COMMENT , by Pete Bower
The elephant in the room
That South Africa has many problems is widely acknowledged by all but the most deluded optimists among us . Many of these could be solved by competent and honest governance and vigorous application of the law . But the real elephant in the room is so big , so complex and so all-pervading in its destructive reach that it will not be solved anytime soon . Certainly not in the lifetime of anybody reading this column . And , yes , it ' s a legacy of Apartheid . And , no , it ' s not Jacob Zuma , the Guptas and the ANC . Here is an outline . Ownership and occupation of rural land in South Africa can be divided broadly into the following categories : There ' s land owned by the state , parastatals , municipalities and local authorities for various purposes . There ' s land owned by private individuals and commercial concerns for agricultural purposes , or for mineral exploitation etc . And then there are the vast tracts of land which were formerly Apartheid-era “ homelands ”. On a drive through the country it ' s easy to identify the latter two types of land . After passing large tracts of uninhabited land quite clearly being cultivated for crops or nurtured for grazing one comes across tracts dotted with hundreds of small homesteads reaching up steep hillsides and down to the roadside . If you care to correlate the positions of these with old rural maps from the Apartheid era you will see that in most cases they correspond very closely to the positions of the old homelands or Bantustans , either the “ independent ” ones such as Transkei , Ciskei and Bophutatswana or those that managed to escape the independence farce . The populations of these settlements were derived brutally ~ by removing families forcibly from “ white ” areas and trucking them and their goods and chattles to the new areas , where they were left to fend for themselves . And so they did , marking out patches of land on which they built a dwelling and in time came , at best , to be peasant farmers . The niceties of urban spatial planning were never applied , so roads through these settlements tend to be rutted and windy dirt tracks , electricity and water supply is rudimentary and sewage services non-existent . By modern urban standards the properties thus demarkated are quite large … a hectare or more . But by agricultural standards the properties barely qualify as smallholdings . They certainly aren ' t viable farming units for anything but the most intensive semi-industrial agricultural production , for which the residents have not the capital to invest , nor the know-how to run nor the market in which to sell the produce . And , of course , the settlements tend to be far from urban markets and industrial hubs . But there ' s another aspect to this , compounded , ironically , by the ANC ' s laudable attempts to develop infrastructure in these areas . Education . The distances residents of these stettlements have to travel ~ to walk ~ to get anywhere are quite great given the sizes of the properties . This applies especially to the schoolchildren . So the government has had to build many , many primary and secondary schools in these areas , each serving a relatively small number of households given the low population density . Thus they probably don ' t individually have more than a few hundred pupils each , and they are far from grand : a few prefab classroom blocks are augmented by a few brick structures , a long-drop toilet block some distance from the classrooms . No school hall , no labs , probably only a rudimentary library , no inviting “ quad ”. No sports field with smart pavilions , no swimming pool . But each school has to have a head , heads of departments , a school governing body and all the paraphernalia of governance , which we all know is not this administration ' s strong point . How much better and more efficient would it not be if these many small poor schools could be consolidated into a few well-resourced mega schools , with all the bells and whistles of good education , a single efficient management structure and carefully monitored and guided teachers ? So here ' s the great South African problem : Vast numbers of rural South Africans are condemned to a life of penury , generation after generation , because they have no means by which they can claw their way out of the poverty trap . And their children are condemned to a totally inadequate , inefficient education which will never equip them to cope and prosper in the modern world . And I can ’ t think of any South African politician , economist , social scientist or educator who has even the foggiest of a plan to overcome this problem . Can you ?
SAY YOU SAW IT IN THE GAUTENG SMALLHOLDER