Thank you, Madam Chair. This is my maiden speech in this august House. I am glad that the ANC-led government has identified job creation and rural development as part of its government's list of priorities. In this financial year, there is a clear indication of how seriously we are regarding both job creation and agrarian reform in this country. The same sentiments were shared in this House by the President of the country, President Jacob Zuma, during his first state of the nation address when he said:
Working together with our people in the rural areas, we will ensure a comprehensive rural development strategy, linked to land and agrarian reform, and food security as our third priority.
Rural development revolves mainly around land or is a matter of land distribution. For that reason it touches the very nerve of our national side, the fears and hopes shaped mainly by our past. We are cognisant of this challenge and what is entailed within the context of our democratic norms and values. We will engage as we see fit to ensure that development in our rural communities does indeed transform the lives of the majority of our people.
Rural development and agrarian reform are integral to the objective of a better life for all for, working together, we can indeed do more to achieve these objectives. As a matter of fact, history tells us that land distribution in our country was biased towards the minority section of our population as a result of the inhuman system of apartheid and separate development. This, in essence, created limits for the majority section of the population in accessing land in their country of birth, both for farming development and residential use. Surely this was done through biased policies which resulted in today's skewed land patterns.
Depriving people in their country of birth is like denying them the right to life. The supreme law of the country, namely the Constitution, particularly section 25, guarantees the people of this country their right to land. This, as we are aware, is premised on the old but very important document of our struggle, the Freedom Charter, citing the victory of our struggle in overcoming injustices. The Freedom Charter long ago declared: "All shall have the right to land." It is in the realisation of this very objective that questions of rural development and agrarian reform must be understood. We are aware of the challenges and hurdles before us and indeed a lot of agricultural land is still in the hands of the minority section of our population. Yet in the same spirit in which the Freedom Charter was adopted nearly 60 years ago, we declare: We dare not fail the masses of our people.
There are a few black people who have acquired land after the introduction of government's progressive land policies and we know that this is not enough. Accessibility to agricultural land is a great hindrance, with most people having limited opportunity to compete even in the commercial centre. With government's rural development programme, this must obviously change. When we took the resolution that by 2014 30% of agricultural land must have been transferred to the majority of the population, we understood the importance of agriculture in transforming the lives of our people. To date only 5% of that land has been successfully redistributed, and we hope that the process will be further accelerated to meet the 2014 deadline.
On our part, and as representatives of the people in our oversight function in particular, we will do what we can to ensure that the deadline is not missed. Indeed, working together we can avoid this ugly situation confronting our people. We don't want to experience the challenges facing our neighbours regarding the land issue. Therefore, failure to act effectively and efficiently to deal with this matter will take our country nowhere. This country must be dealt with equitably, and handled very delicately and as openly as possible. Success in respect of the land issue will be measured by the gains from our progressive legislation, as passed by our Parliament. It is for this reason that the ANC made a special request for the review of land reform projects at its conference in Polokwane.
Esi sigqibo sigxininise ekubeni kukhawuleziswe ukusasazwa kweenkonzo, ingakumbi iindlela kunye nezinye iinkonzo ezifana nombane namanzi okunkcenkceshela, ukuqinisekisa ukuba amaphandle ayesaya kuba ngoozimele geqe ayakwazi ukuba abe nezisetyenziswa ezizezawo, nokuba amafama ayakwazi ukuba azuze kwezi nkonzo simahla. (Translation of isiXhosa paragraph follows.)
[This decision is focused on speeding up service delivery, more especially in roads infrastructure and other services such as electricity and water for irrigation, in order to make sure that the former homelands have their own facilities, and that farmers can benefit from these services for free.]
Madam Chair, let me reiterate that land reform is attached to the idea of fighting poverty and equality. We must act decisively to address this challenge. It seems recurrently that the issue of land redistribution in our country is clouded by unnecessary speculation ...