A popular narrative holds that land reform has failed. But evidence from a study across four provinces tells a different story. Success is not about land reform alone, but about building capable farmers.
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A popular narrative holds that land reform has failed. But evidence from a study across four provinces tells a different story. Success is not about land reform alone, but about building capable farmers.
Richard Kima
South Africa's new 3% inflation target is navigating its first external shock in the face of the hefty fuel price hike. The evidence suggests that containing inflation can boost growth, but this dividend is conditional. What determines whether it materialises has as much to do with fiscal policy as with monetary credibility.
Andries du Toit
Millions of South Africans are opting for a "third way" of urban living: low-density, spacious housing on the urban periphery under traditional land tenure. These settlements are the product of "co-production" between residents, traditional leaders, and a fragmented state. While they offer a powerful aspirational vision for many, they also present a looming governance crisis characterized by a breakdown in the social contract and a "fiscal exit" from municipal land taxation systems. Addressing this requires a paradigm shift in urban planning—one that moves away from the ideal of the "compact city" towards a serious engagement with the spatial and political realities of the exurban frontier.
Nicole Vellios
National Treasury has proposed a national online gambling tax in addition to existing provincial taxes. This measure is intended to curb the rapid growth in online gambling activity and address its negative social harms. From 2021/22 to 2024/25, online and retail betting has more than tripled, while total gambling expenditure (which includes brick-and-mortar casinos, bingo, and limited payout machines) has more than doubled. [1,2]
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Editor's Corner
The latest editions of Econ3x3 feature two timely articles: one on the unemployment crisis – or as the writers put it the “crisis of missing jobs” - the other on the state of SA agriculture at a time when it is under threat by both domestic and foreign naysayers.
The first, by a group of writers associated with the public employment programmes, the Presidential Employment Stimulus and the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative, argue that many have approached the unemployment crisis - particularly youth unemployment – through a faulty lens. Fewer than three million jobs have been created since 2015 – a period when more than four million new jobseekers entered the labour market.
It is time to reframe the question: “An unemployment crisis tends to make us ask: what is wrong with the people who cannot find work? A crisis of missing jobs makes us ask: what is wrong with our society that it cannot create ways for people to contribute even though there is so much work to be done to make South Africa a better place to live in?”
Public employment programmes have been criticized as being an inadequate solution to the unemployment crisis. However, the writers argue, the “employment stimulus has shown… that the state and civil society have the capacity to create higher quality, better paid work that meets growing social and environmental needs..[and] provide work experience,… for a labour market that is unable to do so.”
Also timely, given the misinformation about the “targeting” of white farmers, is the measured article by Wandile Sihlobo about the state of South African agriculture.
Democracy has been good for the sector, he argues: it has more than doubled output since 1994 and last year the country was the 32nd-largest agricultural exporter world-wide. True, it faces serious challenges, including crime and inept municipalities; it is also true that land-reform projects have stumbled, largely due to the “inertia” of the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development.
But the big picture tells us that South African agriculture has “benefited from its connectivity with the world since 1994.” It is as much a message to domestic doomsayers as it is to foreign critics: “The stories we tell about ourselves and the country matter. They shape views domestically, and how others outside view us.”
Pippa Green