South
Africans whose
land was confiscated
under racist laws in the
apartheid era have lodged more than 27,000 legal claims at “mobile
land claims ******s” housed in buses and four-wheel-drive trucks, a
land rights commission said.
Six specially adapted vehicles have travelled between remote rural communities since April 2015, reaching more than 100,000 households, according to the Commission on the Restitution of
land Rights, which operates them.
They are part of an initiative to contact victims of racially motivated
land dispossession and help them
claim back their land.
Under the previous Union and
apartheid white-mi**rity governments, segregationist laws severely restricted the right of black South
Africans to own
land and forced millions onto reservations.
Alfred Msibi, 97, and Maria Sibisi, 79, from **rtheastern Mpumalanga Province, told Commission officials they hoped the use of mobile ******s would speed up access to compensation for their historical claims.
“We have had ** peace since the day we were dispossessed of our ancestral land,” a Commission statement quoted them as saying.
The Restitution of
land Rights Bill, aimed at restoring
land to those who had it
taken from them during the
apartheid era, was among the first laws passed by the country’s first democratic government in **vember 1994.
But many people failed to
claim their
land in the initial period from 1995 to 1998, and President Jacob Zuma re-opened their right to make claims when he signed the Restitution of
land Rights Amendment Act on June 30, 2014.
**mfundo Ntloko-Gobodo, Chief
land Claims Commissioner, said the decision was made to re-open claims because many families had **t been aware that they qualified for the process, the commission statement said.
It quoted him as saying he was confident the mobile ******s would enable farmers to reclaim their
land by the 2019 deadline.
The vehicles contain electronic equipment to register claims on site, and have toured sparsely populated areas of **rtheastern Limpopo province and towns in desert regions of **rthern Cape province.
The initiative aimed to contact rural people who could **t reach the 14 fixed-location ******s, which are mostly in urban centres.
Staff are registering claims for South
Africans who were dispossessed of
land after June 19, 1913 - when the **torious “Natives
land Act” came into force.
The Act prevented black South
Africans from owning
land outside designated reservations which amounted to just 7 percent of agricultural land, though black South
Africans formed 67 percent of the population.
Under the Act and subsequent legislation, more than 3 million people were forcibly relocated to black townships and “Bantustan” homelands.
Land remains a highly emotive issue in South Africa, where 300 years of colonial rule and white-mi**rity government left the vast majority of farmland in the hands of a tiny, mainly white, mi**rity.
The 1996 constitution places a duty on the government to ensure equitable
land distribution and address the consequences of the 1913 Act.
In 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, 90 percent of all agricultural
land was owned or leased by just 60,000 white commercial farmers, according to government figures.
The National Development Plan set a target of transferring 20 percent of agricultural
land to black South
Africans by 2030. Between 1994 and 2014, the state handed 7.5 million hectares to black farmers, 46 percent of this target, according to official figures.
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