President Jacob Zuma has warned party members that the government was unlikely to meet its target of transferring 30 percent of farming land to blacks.
|||By Giordano Stolley
Durban - President Jacob Zuma on Saturday warned party members that the government was unlikely to meet its target of transferring 30 percent of farming land to blacks.
Zuma was speaking at the African National Congress' 101st anniversary celebrations at Durban's Kings Park stadium.
He said the government would replace the “willing buyer; willing seller” principle with a “just and equitable” principle of land expropriation.
The “willing buyer; willing seller” principle he said had not “sufficiently addressed the problems of land ownership”.
The government would also “re-open the lodgement date for claims and provide for the exception to the 1913 cut-off date to accommodate historical landmarks, heritage sites and descendants of the Khoi and San who lost their land long before 1913.”
He said these amendments to the country's laws would be done later this year.
It was at the party's 52nd elective conference in Polokwane in 2007 where the target of 30 percent was set.
Zuma said that much of South Africa's problems could be traced back to the 1913 Land Act where 87 percent of the land was distributed to whites, with the remaining 13 percent being allocated to blacks. - Sapa