Among South Africa’s majority black population, owning farm land marked an important milestone in the government’s land restitution programme meant to correct past wrongs of land maladministration in the country, President Cyril Ramaphosa has said.
Ramaphosa said this on Saturday afternoon when he handed over title deeds to 32 black farmers who now have full control of the land which they have been working on for 25 years in the northern Limpopo Province’s town of Groblersdal.
According to the president, the aim of handing over the title deeds to the farmers was to achieve both food security and economic prosperity in the country.
“You had a vision for many, many years,” he told the farmers.
“But we’ve also have a vision as government to harness land development and to make sure that the land leads to uplifting our people and also leads to economic prosperity,” he said.
He added: “It has been a vision for your community as you spent 25 years fighting to see that this dream that you have is realised.”
“We’d like to thank you for your patience and courage. You have stood on your own feet and fought for this land,” Ramaphosa said.
He emphasised that his government had committed to the issue of land reform, and that the land was going to be redistributed to correct the current status quo where the minority whites own 70 percent of the country’s arable land forcibly grabbed from black people during colonial and apartheid regimes in the past 400 years.
NM/as/APA