Dear Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development,

I write again as a high potential black Individual, who day dreams of farming every day of my current existence.

In my journey to secure a safe land for my small stock (goats and sheep), from failing to obtain state land on lease, I have visited a few CPAs to see how they could assist me to secure my flock.

Some CPAs were well run and running organized programs, such that my flock would interfere negatively with their ongoing programs. Other CPAs had been converted to residential townships in the middle of farmlands, RDP buildings on top of fertile lands. Then there was this one CPA that personified the ethos of the new South Africa: lofty promises, good plans, good speeches but regressive policies (regressive education curriculums, regressive residential land allocations etc.).

The CPA I finally stopped at was a 160Ha farm, complete with a farm house, diesel generator, 2 tractors, 2 boreholes and storage facilities. It had the hallmarks of what once was a flourishing farm. The CPA is a farm, because it used to produce sunflower, yellow maize, cabbage and other food products. More than 15yrs since it's Allocation, the crop field has never been tilled or fertilized for any crop. From the more than 15 beneficiaries that were lumped in the CPA, only one of them is a farmer and only one of them remained on the land for more than 10yrs on his own, breeding pigs, domestic chickens and a flock of sheep and goats. With all his efforts, he uses less than 10Ha of the farm and thats most roamed by the sheep and goats. He personally cannot afford to use more than 1Ha of the land for cultivation of any crop.

Bringing me to my point. If our government was sincere about restoring the dignity of Africans through land restitution, then CPAs would have been a focal point of intensive government investment, to ensure that the flourishing farms that were so generously purchased from white farmers continue to thrive in the hands of their new black beneficiaries.

The return on investment is highly likely, the state would recover its capital investments and reinvest it in the next crop of beneficiaries, while creating new black commercial Cooperatives.

As with many state initiatives, the CPAs have quickly become leading indicators of black government failure, where something of high potential, with a lifetime legacy, is half done and this committee is given paper exercise reports on land restitution. Yet in effect, valuable farmland is being parceled out only to become barren white elephants, which eventually gets misallocated to the Housing Department as impromptu townships in the middle of fertile Agricultural zones.

I beseech this Committee to fulfill its mandate by rescuing the current failing CPAs, ensuring that the R1.3bn being underspent by the Department is actually invested in restoring the dignity of black people allocated with farmland, by ensuring that they are empowered with training and actually incubated to actually start farming. Just like the apartheid government did invest state resources to secure the dignity of middle class white people. The current government may still have an opportunity to redeem itself by deliberately going about restoring the dignity of the historically disadvantaged masses of African people in South Africa.

I am not sure if I am just writing to a robot, where my message will end up in some Recycl Bin on a computer or this is me speaking to my government but should this message reach actual people serving in government, I beseech you to apply your hearts and minds to a cry of a hopeless African young man, who still believes that his government will some day value African lives in an African continent.

Yours humbly
High potential individual (slowly loosing hope)