Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana has rejected as "malicious" recent media insinuations that the country's land reform will go the "Zimbabwe route" following her ministry's decision not to perpetuate prolonged farm selling price negotiations.

"There are many farmers we have been negotiating land prices with for more than four to five years without success. Surely, we cannot keep on negotiating forever, especially genuine restitution cases,"
Xingwana said in a statement.

"These prolonged discussions are unjustifiable. The Restitution Act clearly stipulates what process should be followed by both the government and farmers during negotiations, including in cases of stalled price negotiations," she added.

For the past 12 years, government had only managed to deliver less than 4% of the 2014 30% land redistribution target agreed to in 1994.
The Land Summit held last year in Nasrec had identified, among others, the "Willing-buyer, Willing-seller" principle, including some farmers'
use of prolonged price negotiations as a delaying tactic, as one of the main contributing factors to the slow pace of land reform, the minister said.

She asserted that the e recent media reports, which equate her position on protracted negotiations - and her call to limit negotiations to a six months period - to so-called "Zimbabwean-style land grabs" was deliberately mischievous as the ministry had stated over and again that South African land reform would always be conducted within the ambits of the rule of law, in an orderly, peaceful and sustainable manner.

She added that the South African land reform programme was a constitutional obligation and the process was governed by the Restitution Act which unambiguously stipulated what and how the Minister could implement the restitution process - including expropriation - and the country's courts had the jurisdiction to declare any steps the minister took outside the legal framework to be ultra vires and therefore, unconstitutional. – I-Net Bridge