I have always said that the reason President Mbeki of South Africa won’t intervene in Zimbabwe is because he is Mugabe’s ideological admirer. Government-backed land redistribution in Zimbabwe only resulted in formerly white commercial farms going unused. Famine set in, and when international donors sent food aid, Mugabe’s government seized it.

The government in South Africa has always been making attempts at “racial justice,” but it has been generally by market means. They want to have at least 30% of the land tranferred to black farmers by 2014, though only an estimated 5% has switched hands fairly. So what happens when the market just doesn’t work out the way you want it to? You use the government, of course! And with only ten years to meet that socialist quota, drastic measures must of course be taken.

A national summit including local and national officials agreed Sunday that more active state intervention was needed to speed the pace of land redistribution to nonwhites and so to rectify one of the injustices of apartheid.

During a five-day summit at a Johannesburg conference center, some 1,000 delegates, which included local and national officials, activists and farmers discussed concerns that whites still owned most of South Africa’s land, some of which was wrongly confiscated from the black and mixed communities during white racist rule.

“There is a need to review the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle and come up with a state-driven approach to land reform,” Land Affairs Minister Thoke Didiza said, noting that delegates were nearly unanimous on the subject.

Didiza said the government would now consider proposals on a way forward. The process is likely to be drawn out and complicated, as the government did not want to antagonize foreign investors.

Mugabe’s policies have made him very popular among blacks in South Africa, and that is very dangerous for its democracy and development. Could be it be that, ten years from now, South Africa takes on the form of its neighbor? I am going to post two quotes below. Tell me which one you think is correct.

For forced land redistribution:

“We want this process to begin immediately,” said Mangaliso Kubheka, national organisor for the Landless People’s Movement. “We’re waiting to see if the pledge will be implemented. The people have spoken. We need to see if the government will listen.”

Against forced land redistribution:

“These people who claim the land, do they use it or do they just leave it lying there?” said Chris Jordaan, property rights manager for the Transvaal Agricultural Union South Africa (TAU SA).

“Are these guys commercial farmers? The big worry is food security. Almost every other country in Africa needs food aid.”

“We don’t say there must be no black commercial farmers,” said Jordaan. “But this land reform is a form of socialistic economic policy. It has not fed people elsewhere in Africa and it has not sustained commercial agriculture.”

Seriously. Tell me.