SOUTH AFRICA BULLETIN
from the headquarters of
TAU SA in Pretoria
Web:
www.tlu.co.zaTel.: + 27 12 804 8031 Fax: + 27 12 804 2014
E-mail:
info@tlu.co.za June 14, 2011
The Bulletin attached hereto is provided as a means to inform stakeholders of agricultural developments in South Africa. These International Bulletins are distributed at regular intervals and can also be found on TAU SA’s website at
www.tlu.co.za.
TAU SA is the oldest agricultural union in South Africa and has been in existence since 1897. The mission of the union is to ensure a productive and safe existence for its members on the land they own. Current reality in South Africa indicates that this is not possible at the moment due to a variety of actions and threats against commercial farmers.
Your comment regarding the Bulletins and other information provided to you is valuable and will be appreciated. However should you prefer not to receive information from TAU SA, please respond by e-mail to
info@tlu.co.za Tea and sympathy - The Magwa Estate Fiasco
The results of the government’s land redistribution policy shambles appear to be filtering through to the general public. An excellent and biting article recently appeared in the weekend sports edition of The Citizen, an unusual placement for such a piece. Columnist William Saunderson Meyer has roundly excoriated the government’s futile land transfer policy which has become spectacularly undone in the case of the Magwa Tea Estate in the Eastern Cape, home of the ANC ruling class and South Africa’s most hapless province in terms of rural development and just about everything else.
Pondoland’s tea was the African continent’s finest, grown successfully at the Magwa Estate. The colourful tea tin legend said that “your canister is a monument to freedom and free enterprise. We, the workers, have purchased our tea estate from our new democratic government. With each cup of tea you make, consider it a celebration of our freedom. You are now inextricably linked to us as a friend…. the final link which distances us from an oppressive past.”
Well, during the oppressive past, the Magwa Estate produced quality tea, and lots of it. It continued to produce tea until “we, the workers” purchased the tea estate (with taxpayers’ money!) from the new democratic government in 1998, and then slowly but surely destroyed the estate, as was (and is) the case with hundreds of farming operations that were handed over to “we, the workers” by the new democratic government. These productive units collapsed ignominiously into either squatter camps or desolate veld, while fingers pointed in all directions instead of to those responsible.
Says Meyer: “Magwa has now imploded and the estate which used to turn over R65 million a season and employ 3 500 people, faces ruin after being looted and abandoned by its workers. An enterprise that was symbolic of the new SA’s hopes has become another casualty of the challenges facing agricultural transformation. A security guard was shot dead, a manager attacked by a panga-wielding mob, vehicles and equipment were stolen or destroyed, permanent workers were driven from their homes by seasonal workers and a year’s production has been lost”
Magwa workers were the best paid in Africa, earning five times the wages of a Malawi worker, while producing less. “We, the workers” demanded a 104% wage increase, while management was only prepared for a 7% increase. Tantrums resulted in the destruction wrought above, while unemployment in the region is double the national average.
What has annoyed Meyer is that this state of affairs has remained a secret, swept under the carpet, despite happening in February of this year. The mayhem and destruction is absent from the Eastern Cape Development’s website where the most recent news about Magwa stops at 2008.
REVEALED IN 2002In February 2002, Dr. Philip du Toit published a book “The Great South African Land Scandal” wherein the Magwa Tea Project was reported to be already ailing and “doomed to financial failure” according to the DA’s Athol Trollip at the time. Eastern Province MEC for Agriculture Max Mamase was budgeting R20 million for a “turnaround strategy” and that money clearly went down the same black hole as all the subsequent funding poured into this travesty.
The 2 500 hectare estate had the potential to produce more than 3,5 million kilograms of good quality tea per year. But this decreased to 955 000 kilograms after years of mismanagement. Money was lost, salaries were not paid and this led to the torching of the estate’s offices by thousands of workers. Creditors began foreclosure actions – some had not been paid since 1998. Of the R20 million “turnaround” money, R15 million was owed to the Land Bank. Since then, various naïve investors were seduced with promises of more “turnarounds” (it is indicative that some of these were overseas investors, clearly not au fait with the Eastern Cape’s management capabilities!), and this money too followed the R20 million into a rat hole.
What is tragic is that on publication of the Land Scandal book, the publisher was accused of racism by the government, while the rest of the country didn’t seem to take note of the pattern of destruction outlined in the book. Certainly, the government turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, pouring more taxpayers’ money into a project that they must have known would never get off the ground.
On the other side of the coin, South Africa’s rooibos tea producers have registered landmark growth. This relatively small industry contributed R500 million to the national gross domestic product in 2009. It is the only segment of the local tea market that has grown consistently. It directly employs more than 5 000 people, with thousands more in the value processing chain On average, about 15 000 tons of rooibos tea is produced a year, with 10 000 tons being exported or used for the production of other products such as skin care, baby care, herbal tea and so forth.
(The Eastern Cape’s notorious performance in virtually everything is exemplified in the handling of a water crisis in January of this year. The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality was fast running out of water but the provincial government was tardy in presenting a request to government for emergency water supplies. Drought was drying up the land, and the late compiling of the request by the Eastern Cape officials to the Ministry of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs resulted in the Ministry telling Business Day in mid January that they should be in a position to obtain the information about what was needed “at the end of this month when everybody comes back from leave”!)
We have queried the silence of the food industry concerning the destruction of commercial agriculture in South Africa, but we hear no voices of criticism or exhortations to leave commercial farming alone. Clearly the mentality exemplified in the official behavior shown above reveals they are unable to handle virtually any crisis. When one examines an advertisement placed in the press in February this year by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, one can see why.
The Ministry advertises for a “service provider to facilitate the organizational capacity of rural communities to leverage economic opportunities leading to enterprise development and job creation, using the Organisation Workshop Methodology for a period four months”.
Rural communities are either not interested or incapable of “leveraging economic opportunities leading to enterprise development”, as shown in the failure of land redistribution and nowhere more so than at the Magwa Tea Estate. This lack of capacity has been proven time and time again, yet the government insists on trying to get blood out of a stone.. Are we all on the same planet?
