The Top 10 trending South African topics on Twitter are an indication of shifts in the news and chart the topics that are tweeted and re-tweeted the most.
One of the Top 10 topics trending today is Pieter Mulder and his remarks about land reform :
Here are some of the Twitteractions:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/mzi_ndelemane/status/170160640105787392″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/fletoaba/status/170160203780734976″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Charlkie/status/170158083409051648″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Lebeko1/status/170152826041929728″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/SAfmnews/status/170143193189453824″]
What Mulder said:
“Black South Africans have no claim to at least 40% of South Africa because they did not originally live in these areas.”
What Zuma said:
Honourable Mulder stunned all of us and the whole country yesterday with his bold denial of historical facts about land dispossession. We recall the words of Sol Plaatje on the impact of the Natives Land Act of 1913.
He said; “Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913 the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth”
John Langalibalele Dube stated around the same period:
“Most Europeans would not know, and will never know the bitterness of being driven from one’s birth place”.
The land question is one of the most emotive issues in our history and present, and must be handled with utmost care, and not in the careless and callous manner that Honourable Mulder handled it. As a responsible government, we resolved to address the land reform problem through restitution, redistribution and tenure reform within the confines of the Constitution, informed by the national policy of reconciliation and nation building.
We felt it was not going to help the country for us to be emotional about the land question. We therefore urge Honourable Mulder to tread very carefully on this matter. It is extremely sensitive and to the majority of people in this country, it is a matter of life and death.
We have introduced a Green Paper on Land reform. The three fundamentals for land reform, that will apply, are the following:
- The de-racialization of the rural economy;
- The democratic land allocation and use across gender, race and class; and,
- The strict production discipline for guaranteed food security.
Another lesson learnt over the years is that the process of acquiring and distributing a particular piece of land is often lengthy, and this escalates the cost of redistribution because the former owner stops investing in the land.
Many of the farms are therefore in a poor state of repair at the point of acquisition with very low productivity. This led to the adoption of a recapitalization programme in November 2010 run by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform.
By December 2011, about 600 farms were in the process of being rehabilitated through this programme. The centenary of the 1913 Land Act is just a few months away. It is the interests of all South Africans, black and white, and in the interests of national reconciliation that we proceed faster, guided by the Constitution, to transform our policy framework.
