A persistent falsity on land ownership reporting in South Africa - Jaco Lochner
Key topics:
No national cadastre exists, making land ownership claims speculative.
Ingonyama Trust and Bantustans complicate land ownership narratives.
Government may be the largest landowner, yet title deeds remain undistributed.
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By Jaco Lochner
I am an Afrikaner living in South Africa, and I write to you out of growing concern over a persistent and deeply misleading narrative being repeated in local and international media coverage. I write as a concerned South African, not affiliated with any political party or lobby group, but as someone who has followed land reform debates closely. Either this may be of professional interest to you - or your organization might be repeating this claim uncritically in local or international reporting, perhaps due to the lack of accessible data or inherited assumptions. Either way, I believe it’s time for a correction.
Contrary to repeated assertions in the media, South Africa has never had a national cadastre - a complete and detailed public register of all land and property ownership. What we have are fragmented surveys, often commissioned by entities with vested ideological or political interests. These studies do not constitute a comprehensive land audit and fall far short of the standard of evidence required for the sweeping claims that are so often made.
Nevertheless, many journalists (?) continue to assert, with unwarranted certainty, that “whites own most of the land in South Africa”. The truth is: we simply do not know. Without a cadastre, any claim to scientifically verified land ownership proportions is speculative at best, and misleading at worst.
Yes, apartheid-era forced removals devastated communities. Non-white South Africans were uprooted from places like Sophiatown, Cato Manor, District Six, and Lady Selborne under the Group Areas Act. This is not contested. But what’s rarely reported is that white families were also displaced in certain areas (such as parts of the Cape Flats) to make way for the regime’s racially segregated social engineering. In both cases, the state acquired ownership of the land, and from there, decisions about redistribution varied widely--- some areas were handed to white families (as in Sophiatown, which was later renamed Triomf), others to non-white citizens (such as parts of Langa and Gugulethu in Cape Town).
The larger and more troubling question that goes unasked is: what happened to all the remaining land? Anecdotal evidence and legal records suggest that the South African government may be the largest landowner - yet very few journalists are investigating this. We are talking about millions of hectares. Why, after 30 years of democracy, has the government failed to transfer title deeds to the poor, regardless of race? Why are ANC-connected elites acquiring multiple farms and luxury estates while ordinary black and white South Africans remain landless?
In any honest discussion about land ownership in South Africa, it is essential to acknowledge that a significant portion of land - especially in KwaZulu-Natal - is not privately owned by individuals but held under custodianship. The Ingonyama Trust, established in 1994, controls nearly 3 million hectares (around 30% of KwaZulu-Natal), held in trust for the Zulu nation, with the King as sole trustee. Critics have raised concerns that this arrangement denies residents full ownership rights or title deeds. Similarly, vast areas formerly designated as Bantustans or “homelands” under apartheid - including the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei - were never reintegrated into a functioning national land register. Much of this land remains under communal or state custodianship, governed by traditional authorities, and often lacks formal documentation or freehold rights for its occupants. These facts complicate and challenge the prevailing narrative of land distribution solely along racial lines.
While it is often questioned whether land expropriation - with or without compensation - continues in South Africa - and whether such actions are officially sanctioned or occur through political subterfuge - a compelling and deeply unsettling case is explored in Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam by Rehana Rossouw, a Coloured (mixed-race) South African journalist. The book investigates how conservationist Fred Daniel was systematically targeted, harassed, and allegedly dispossessed of land by powerful political actors, raising urgent questions about state complicity and the misuse of land reform rhetoric for personal enrichment. Daniel's R1 billion (approximately USD $56 million) court claim against state entities is due to be heard soon.
It is also critical to note that the vast majority of commercial farmers in South Africa are still white. This is not a political assertion but a statistical reality, based on the profile of registered commercial agricultural enterprises. If these farmers were suddenly and arbitrarily dispossessed without a viable transition plan, it would trigger a food security crisis -not just for South Africa, but for the broader Southern African region. Our agricultural economy is delicate, and ideologically driven redistribution without capacity-building or infrastructural support would endanger millions of lives. One just needs to consider what happened in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s to understand the potentially devastating consequences.
In addition, while rural land reform dominates headlines, urban land inequality is often ignored. The reality is that most South Africans now live in cities, yet millions remain in informal settlements or on land held by municipalities, state-owned enterprises, or provincial governments. This land remains inaccessible to the poor, regardless of race, and its release into the market or for redistribution is often blocked by bureaucratic inertia or elite interests. It is important to investigate cadre deployment and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) - the twin policies of the African National Congress, which governed South Africa from the official end of apartheid in 1994 to the general election of 2024 - which have largely failed to improve broad-based economic participation. This has led to the absurd and deeply unjust scenario in which the child of a wealthy, politically connected elite may receive preferential treatment under Black Economic Empowerment policies - whether for university bursaries, public sector promotions, or employment opportunities - over a poor black child from a rural township or a poor white child from a working-class community, despite the latter facing far greater socio-economic disadvantage. These policies have concentrated capital in the hands of a politically connected elite at the expense of everyone else. This was laid bare by the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, chaired by Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, which concluded that a nefarious network of interests systematically looted an estimated R500 billion - roughly a quarter of South Africa’s GDP at the time - through corruption on an industrial scale, with the proceeds laundered through a combination of international banks, shell companies, false contracts, and cash-based schemes designed to obscure the money trail. The damage wrought by this elite capture has hollowed out state capacity, distorted markets, and undermined the very goals of empowerment these policies were meant to achieve.
It must also be said that private land ownership is not the sole indicator of wealth or privilege. Many white South Africans own land encumbered by debt, or of little economic value, while politically connected individuals - across all racial lines - secure access to lucrative state leases, mining rights, and game farms through opaque deals that are hidden from public view. This too deserves investigative scrutiny.
These are the uncomfortable but necessary questions that require investigation - not simplistic narratives that reinforce division without addressing the underlying truths. True transformation is impossible without transparency - and that requires the courage to ask harder questions, even if they unsettle our assumptions.
For a more profound understanding of South Africa’s long-standing socio-political fault lines, it might help to revisit the impact of the British scorched earth policy and the use of concentration camps (burgher refugee camps) during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), which devastated rural land ownership structures and had consequences that reverberated across the country for over a century.
I urge you to consider what I have written in this email carefully. If you are committed to journalistic integrity and the pursuit of truth, I trust you will agree that we owe the South African public more rigorous and honest reporting on this issue.