Land reform committee admits it lost the thread on rural development

The portfolio committee on land reform and rural development has spent most of its year on the Ingonyama Trust, restitution claims and the governance of communal property associations, and almost none of it on rural development.

That is the committee’s own assessment of its work, presented to members during a virtual meeting on 23 September 2026 and published by Parliament of South Africa on its YouTube channel. The committee met on the platform to review its strategic priorities, consider its annual performance plan for 2026/27, and adopt its fourth term programme.

Over roughly 36 meetings counted from January of last year, the review found that 20% of the committee’s engagements went to the Ingonyama Trust and 20% to accountability matters such as quarterly reports. Restitution took 17%, communal property associations 17%, legislation 14%, labour tenants 9%, and rural development a single meeting.

Women’s land rights, land administration, spatial planning and land use management, and post settlement support were named as areas that did not feature strongly. The review also flagged urban land reform oversight as a gap, recalling that members had raised informal settlement conditions at the committee’s strategic planning session.

The presentation described the pattern as a committee that has been pulled towards casework. A rising volume of complaints from communal property associations has absorbed meeting time and shaped oversight visits, and members were told the committee cannot be bogged down in individual cases at the expense of its wider mandate. The proposed correction is a rebalancing towards rural development, rural youth empowerment and employment, infrastructure in rural areas and farming areas, and the position of farm dwellers who live on privately owned land without the security that labour tenants or claimants have.

Members were also told that follow up on departmental commitments is the committee’s weakest area. A briefing on implementation of committee resolutions did not happen, and the tracking of compliance and progress by the department was recorded as a target the committee did not meet. The committee’s legislative tracker report was not produced. A planned engagement with the House of Traditional Leaders did not take place beyond the strategic planning workshop, and a joint sitting with public works on expropriation regulations did not happen because the matter was before the courts. A meeting with National Treasury and the Financial and Fiscal Commission went ahead without National Treasury, which could not attend.

The review raised a second problem that is administrative but consequential. Reports and presentations arriving late, sometimes the night before or on the morning of a meeting, leave the committee’s research and content support team without time to interrogate them properly. Members heard that this has improved from a worse standard but has begun to slide again. The same review noted that when members raise a batch of questions, responses sometimes cover only some of them, and the unanswered items do not return.

On legislation, the review recorded consistent follow up on the equitable access to land bill and the communal land tenure bill. Neither bill has been referred to the committee, which is why the intended engagement with traditional leaders on communal land tenure has not happened.

One member used the strategy discussion to argue that the committee is not confronting the foundational question. He traced the current legal framework to the 1913 Natives Land Act, the forced removals of 1955, the 1927 black administration legislation and the expropriation legislation of 1975, and said a democratic committee on land should be reviewing decisions made under those laws rather than maintaining the position they created. He raised the case of a community in Melmoth whose claim to land near the magistrate’s court, including the grave of a king, has not been attended to, and said municipalities continue to allocate land in ways that exclude the people dispossessed of it. He also asked where the land taken from kings in 1913 now sits, and who accounts for the opportunity cost borne by people removed from it. The meeting did not resolve those questions.

On the fourth term programme, a member objected that the draft was too inward looking. With elections in the period and a short term, he said, there was no space for the committee to receive report backs on outstanding matters, including the Gumbul case in Mpumalanga and the East London matter. Staff told the meeting that the department had committed to submitting a report on the East London matter within 14 days but had indicated it was still working on it. The committee’s annual reports from the department and its entities had also not yet been tabled, and members were warned the programme may have to be revised if they do not arrive.

The objection produced a change. The member moved adoption of the fourth term programme with an amendment, adding a sitting on 2 December to deal with outstanding matters as the committee wraps up its year. It was seconded and adopted.

That programme runs from a joint meeting with the agriculture committee on 29 September, through the budget review and recommendations process in October, a constituency period, the 4 November local elections, departmental briefings on rural economic development and on first and second quarter performance in November, and an international study tour to India. The final scheduled meeting on 2 December is set to take briefings on the communal land bill and the equitable access to land bill.

The meeting was chaired in an acting capacity after the chairperson sent word that other commitments prevented attendance. The committee elected a member to hold the position for the sitting, as the National Assembly rules require.

Source: Parliament of South Africa, Portfolio Committee on Land Reform and Rural Development, 23 September 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJaFutl8bEw