Evictions: Laws 'not working'

2006-08-13 20:02

Polokwane - Black farm workers were still victims of large-scale illegal evictions, despite the introduction of post-apartheid laws meant to protect them, a rights group said.

Philemon Talane of the Nkuzi Development Association, which helps fight illegal evictions, said: "That's why you are beginning to see in major centres, lots and lots of these squatter camps. The majority of those people are ... from the farms."

Farmers say such actions are rare and done purely to cut costs in an increasingly competitive and ailing industry.

A 2004/'05 study by Nkuzi and independent research body Social Surveys found that about 1.7 million farm workers had been evicted in the past two decades.

It said the vast majority of these evictions were illegal.

The study highlights the potentially explosive land issue in South Africa.

The government has tried to erase that legacy through laws that guarantee security of tenure after five years of residence on a property and require evictions to be sanctioned by a court.

'Still searching for security'

The report says evictions continued unabated in the post-apartheid era, with more than 900 000 leaving farms since 1994.

"Only just over one percent of farm evictions have followed any legal process," said the 228-page report, entitled "Still searching for security".

It said the government was failing to meet its goal of addressing the inequalities between owners and occupiers.

It said farmers' fears surrounding the political change in 1994 was one reason for a rise in evictions at the time.

More recently, financial pressures facing the industry, especially after the introduction of a minimum wage for farm labourers in 2003, had been important.

Many scared of confrontation

Legal safeguards were doing little to shield farm dwellers, said Talane.

"It (the law) provides ways on how you can evict farm workers," he said recently in Limpopo, where Nkuzi does much of its work.

"For a farmer getting lawyers to go to court is easy because they have money. For farm workers whose literacy level is very low ... it's difficult to ask a farmer: do you have a court order to evict me?'

"That's why it's very difficult for them to enforce their rights on the farm."

- Reuters