Wanting More Of The Pie.(Brief Article)

Activists called it "The Week of the Landless." But proponents of land reform in southern Africa occupied center stage only briefly at the start of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Their protest campaign began when 2,000 people marched through Johannesburg's business district demanding more land and jobs for the poor, and an end to the forced demolition of squatter camps; 77 were arrested in a scuffle with police. More than 8,000 security police were on hand to ensure that the protesters' grand finale--a weekend march from the squalid slum of Alexandra to the glass-and-steel conference site--did nothing to upset the assembled dignitaries. "They know what we want but they're refusing to listen," said Mangaliso Khubeka, national coordinator of the Landless People's Movement.

But there's no sidelining this issue--not in southern Africa. In Zimbabwe, a two-year-old political crisis was back on the boil last week. Saturday was eviction day for 3,000 white farmers, though many still were fighting in court to stay or be paid for their property. Zimbabwe's defiant president, Robert Mugabe, was headed for the Johannesburg summit, presumably to hold forth on how the farm seizures further the idea of "sustainable development." In neighboring Namibia, President Sam Nujoma warned his country's white ranchers that they risk the same fate if they don't more readily offer their land for sale in a government redistribution plan. As South African officials watched the rand fall against the dollar, they could only whisper the words "It won't happen here." But South Africa's government, led by the African National Congress Party, isn't immune from the region's growing disillusionment. Defensively, the ANC is working on new ways to give blacks a more equitable share of the country's wealth.

The latest reports from Zimbabwe were a public-relations nightmare for the conference hosts, who have seen foreign investors scared away by the violent land grab next door. While Mugabe's brutal tactics are widely deplored, many Africans are sympathetic to his basic grievance. Namibia faces similar pressures. Nujoma last week announced plans to expropriate 192 farms owned by absentee white landlords. "Although we enjoy peace and stability in this country, up to now more than 70 percent of our arable land is still in the hands of the minority white farmers," he told a political convention. "The white landowners must know that the majority landless citizens of this country are daily becoming impatient." Since independence in 1990, Namibia has bought 105 commercial farms and resettled about 30,000 people on them. But Nujoma's cabinet reckons that the government would need to expand its budget for land redistribution nearly tenfold to meet the demands of a quarter million landless blacks. The government complains that the redistribution program is bogging down because whites want too much money for their land under the "willing buyer, willing seller" principle. Not surprisingly, the white farmers are worried. Said Jaap Jooste, a cattle farmer in Gobabis, ...