Dear Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development,
My name is Thamsanqa John Khase, a grandson and son of former farm workers in the North West. I was raised around livestock and backyard gardening. As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a farmer, in the sense of the white farmers that my grandparents and parents worked for around Mahikeng, Lichtenburg and the Sannieshof areas.
As lineage would have it, my grandparents and parents could only manage to keep enough animals to survive on communal grazing lands on a village. My paternal grandparents and father left no animals behind upon passing. My maternal grandparents managed to leave about 5cattle, 10goats and 20sheep. My maternal uncle inherited the cattle, which he still keeps and has managed to increase. My mother inherited the sheep and they were all stolen in one night from the homestead in the Village. My mother's younger sister inherited the goats, she has since passed on and her daughters inherited them, a lot of them have been stolen, leaving only 2 pregnant does.

I apologize for going down to such detail but I am laying the foundation for my point.

I was fortunate to be selected for a bursary to pursue engineering studies in the mining industry, which I completed and pursuing a professional certification program in the same field at the moment. I am therefore a high potential black individual.

With all this upward mobility in the mining career, my heart stays stuck on the one passion and calling to farm commercially, just like my grandparents former employers did. I have however avoided entering the communal farming disaster that is busy destroying the hopes of many well intentioned but cash strapped families in villages. I took the route of seeking a black farmer who had more land than he needed in Rustenburg, where I was plying my mining trade, as this was a supposed to be a safer option of farming than communal farming. I bought a flock of sheep and goats, 21 in total in 2019. 3yrs later, I have lost more than half of all the newborns through stock theft, because the farm is too close to an informal settlement near the mines, where residents are facing unemployment and retrenchments.

With all this in mind, one can imagine how excited I was in 2020, when I read that Mam Thoko Didiza was about to release 300 000Hectares of 700 000Hectares to the North West, as State Land Allocations for lease. I was beside myself with hope and excitement, looking forward to even as little as 50Hectares, because that's what a start up small stock farmer would need to establish a proper breeding program and plant feed production crops I.e. Lucerne, Alfalfa, Yellow maize etc.. To my disappointment, upon application, I noticed that the farms on offer were so large, that emerging farmers would take decades just to afford the fencing to conduct proper paddocking for breed segregation.

This is the crux of my message to the Committee. I am of the view that the land that was allocated between Nov 2020 and April 2021 was hurriedly allocated without really considering the actual efficiency of land use versus what emerging Farmers could afford to actually use. It feels like the political pressure to allocate land took precedence over the actual functionality of how the land would be used to benefit the beneficiaries, the Agricultural Sector and the Economy.

Looking at the state of CPAs in the North West, it is clear that the state is not in a position to Capitalize the use of 300 000Ha of land, over any period. Therefore the land may have been handed to black Africans but it will become a 300 000Ha White Elephant that most CPAs smaller than that are. The beneficiaries were literally given lands too big for emerging farmers and the land, instead of being a boon, they will be a burden that will likely lead to failure on the part of those who have no funds to even fence lands that big or even cultivate sizable areas to make efficient use of the land.

Why does this affect me? I am a subsistence farmer without a land, and I only needed a small portion that I could secure from my income and learn to develop a breeding program that would then take me to a position of commercialization, wherein I would make means to extend the land needs, as the enterprise develops. I would have learnt from a small portion of land and replicate the lessons on moderate to larger portions of land.

It is my conclusion that, a lot more emerging farmers could have been covered by the land Allocation program, a lot more enterprises, a lot more creativity and ingenuity could have been unearthed through Sub-Dividing lands into multiple smaller portions, creating a new large network of black neighbor farmers, learning from each other and protecting each other from predators and stock thieves, just like the white farmers do.

An opportunity was missed to make a serious dent on food production, food security and unemployment.

To be continued...