Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe said yesterday that there was still a chance to avert anarchy in South Africa by landowners volunteering land.

He was speaking at the beginning of the National Forum for Dialogue on Land, Heritage and Human Rights in Johannesburg.

He warned if rational people did not take the land discussion forward and come up with ideas which made land distribution a reality, the extremists would take over the debate.

“Volunteer land, because there is land hunger among black South Africans. And if you think the status quo can continue, you are planting the seed for land occupation,” said Mantashe, himself a small farm owner.

He was referring to a conversation with “colleagues – mainly white farmers”.

He said he told them if land grabs started in SA, they would make the land grabs in Zimbabwe look like a “Sunday picnic”.

This comes as the crucial land debate gathers steam.

In addition to the forum, the parliamentary constitutional review committee will be hitting the road in the near future – and the answer to who actually owns how much of South Africa’s 1.2 million square kilometres remains up for grabs.

The Institute for Race Relations yesterday dropped its report, Who Owns the Land: A Critique of the State Land Audit, wherein it found the “reliability of the data is not beyond question”.

Headed by project manager Terence Corrigan, the report dismantles the 2017 land audit conducted by the department of rural development and land reform.

Viewed nearly a million times since its February release, the audit has been used as a rallying cry for land reform.

It found that whites owned 26 663 144 hectares (or 72%) of the total 37 031 283ha farms and agricultural holdings by individual landowners. They are followed by coloured at 5 371 383ha (15%), Indians at 2 031 790ha (5%), Africans at 1 314 873 ha (4%), other at 1 271 562ha (3%), and co-owners at 425 537ha (1%).

“First-off, the more appropriate figure for ‘restoration’ is in fact 8.1 million hectares (6.6% of the extent of SA), as a further five million hectare of agricultural land has been acquired and transferred by government since 1994 through its land redistribution programme,” said Corrigan.

“Little of this land would be individually owned today as most land claims and redistribution projects had multiple beneficiaries, and furthermore since 2009 the government has held back from granting title to the beneficiaries of the land redistribution programme.

“In addition, government has made no effort to ensure those living on their ancestral land in former homeland areas acquire individual title to their land.”

Corrigan noted that the report itself provided “little meaningful basis for discussion” as to overall patterns of rural land ownership in the country – let alone of agricultural land in particular.

– amandaw@citizen.co.za