South Africa announces first farm expropriation

South Africa on Thursday announced the first expropriation of a commercial farm, in line with a pledge to harden its stance toward white farmers demanding more compensation than the state deems fair.
After two-and-a-half years of negotiations failed to produce a settlement, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said an expropriation notice would be served on Hannes Visser, owner of a farm in North West province.
"Indeed having gone through the long tedious process, the submission to the minister was made with a clear intention to expropriate the farm," regional land claims commissioner Blessing Mphela said in a statement.
Mphela said the Land Affairs and Agriculture Minister Thoko Didiza approved the expropriation about a week ago.
The government offered to buy the 500-hectare (1,250-acre) cattle and crop farm for 1.75 million rand (275,000 dollars / 226,000 euros) but Visser rejected the offer, saying his farm was worth three million rand. Visser told the SAPA news agency he had not officially received the expropriation notice but that he intended to fight it in court. "Should the courts turn out to be my final recourse, I will go that route," said Visser, whose father bought the land in 1968.
According to the land claims commission, which confirmed that this was the first commercial farm to be expropriated in South Africa, the property originally belonged to Abram Molamu.
"The original owners of the property were dispossessed through forced sale transactions" by the apartheid government, Mphela said. Mphela alluded to a recent national lands conference, which ended with a call for a "new mechanism" to meet the government's goal of handing over nearly a third of white-owned land to new black farmers by 2014.
Land Affairs Minister Didiza had then said the 1,000 delegates at the gathering had rejected the current "willing seller, willing buyer" principle that has underpinned land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Mphela said that conference had come out with a "renewed mandate from all the organs of civil society, private sector and indeed the government circles to fast-track the land reform programme."
Tozi Gwanya, the chief land claims commissioner, told AFP in an interview earlier that the willing buyer, willing seller policy was not working and that white farm owners were demanding exorbitant prices sometimes.