South Africa fears copy-cat invasions

With the crisis in Zimbabwe threatening to destabilise southern Africa and already hitting the region's economies, a worried South African government is acting to avert potential invasions of white land by the country's mass army of dispossessed rural poor.

With the crisis in Zimbabwe threatening to destabilise southern Africa and already hitting the region's economies, a worried South African government is acting to avert potential invasions of white land by the country's mass army of dispossessed rural poor.

Thoko Didiza, the Land and Agricultural Minister, this week announced plans to offer a "standard settlement" to people claiming compensation for land unjustly removed during apartheid, to speed up a restitution process that has only resolved 4,000 of 65,000 claims.

Last week, a community in the Western Cape threatened land invasion if its land claims were not dealt with swiftly. In Mpumalanga province, police had to warn angry blacks evicted from white-owned farms they have lived on for years, not to take the law into their own hands.

There have been creeping invasions for years of "white" farms in some densely populated, poor rural areas of South Africa, says Chris Marfo, a researcher at the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre, a Johannesburg think tank. "The gradual occupation of farms has forced some owners to leave and others to abandon parts of their land," he said.

Resentment has also been generated over large scale farm evictions carried out in the past decade by white farmers worried that post-apartheid laws will entrench pay and land rights to workers and tenant farmers on their farms.

Last year, hundreds of white farmers were killed during robberies and attacks, a reflection as much of South Africa's high crime rate as it is of deep aggression directed by many blacks at people they feel have exploited them and their land.

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has blatantly used land hunger and invasions to earn rural votes in the run-up to elections. But neighbouring countries such as Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Swaziland cannot isolate themselves from Mugabe's irrationality. There is no southern African country that can claim to have made great strides in land reform, though South Africa has strong constitutional protections of property rights and has made the most progress so far.

But in the wake of a recent opinion poll that showed 54 per cent of black South Africans supporting land grabs in Zimbabwe, and with its own land reforms complex and sluggish, not even the South African government can rest easy.

Chief restitution commissioner, Wallace Mgoqi, said earlier this week that the government was considering a set amount of money - in the region of £4,000 - to land claimants where other forms of restitution were not feasible. But the government's land response is looking a little panic stricken.