Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

MR JACK: Thank you, Chairperson.  As has been indicated by my colleagues, the Land Bank is an autonomous statutorian institution which provides finance to agricultural initiatives.
 It has, historically, operated in the context of oppressive rural Apartheid and was structured as an instrument for the implementation of State policy.
 Land Bank can be regarded as a successful development finance institution, given that it is largely self-financing and offers an effective service to its existing clients.
 However, it also had a clear role in producing rural misery and poverty.  Prompted largely by racist State policies, which Land Bank applied and from which it benefitted.
 The Land Bank acknowledges its distinct racial bias in its business practises during the period under review in which we forecast almost exclusively on Whites.  We also acknowledge that many White farmers received support, not because they were good farmers who showed potential, but because they were White.
 Land Bank acknowledges its role in supporting the displacement of Black South African of the land during the dark cast years of Apartheid.  Most aspects of Land Bank business was highly regulated by the enabling statute which often prescribes strict limitations, but we accept that our security requirements, not all of which were imposed by statute, effectively excluded Black people who had been stripped of their land rights.
 We also acknowledge that innovations made during the years were not applied in ways which could have increased eligibility of Black farmers, including those in the former homelands for credit services.
 Land Bank acknowledges that it was part of a complex work of institutional arrangement in rural South Africa, which led to growth in the political support enjoyed by the National Party.
 We acknowledge that Land Bank lending practises undermined food security.  By supporting control boards which inflated food prices at a time when Black farming was collapsing.
 The fact that the Land Bank did not concern itself adequately with the working conditions of farm workers, contributed to a climate in which workers were dehumanised and were the victims of severe human rights violations.
 We also acknowledge that we financed farmers who bought land released by forced removals and thereby played an instrumental part in the worst aspects of Apartheid.
 Land Bank policies which caused particular hardship were the promotion of a mechanisation and the adoption of the economic unions, both of which accelerated the process of forced ...(indistinct) and contributed to rural suffering.
 Land Bank concedes that it has recently played a very direct role in recapitalising White farmers, offering yet another set of benefits to White farmers over their Black colleagues.
 This has contributed a high land - to high land prices and made it more difficult to implement the land reform programme.  Land Bank also acknowledges a history of gender discrimination, both in terms of our treatment of women farmers and with regard to the difficulties faced by women staff in a (indistinct) environment.
 Land Bank is an institution set up to implement state policy and this is some kind of mitigating factor.  We were profoundly effected by the racist and oppressive institutional milieu of the day and the effect that had on our day to day operations cannot be overstated.
 Land Bank is of the belief that as an institution wholly owned by the State, the best of correcting the past is to improve our services and to offer real support to emerging farmers, millions of which we have in South Africa.
 We wish to conclude to this submission, by apologising as the present board and management unreservedly to those rural people who have been disadvantaged or worse by the practises supported, promoted or implemented by the Land Bank in the past.
 Thank you, Chairperson.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Dr Ally?

RUSSELL ALLY: Thank you very much, Chairperson.  I'm in an invidious position.  I don't know, do I ask two sets of questions, because there are two submissions or just one.
 The Chairman is very strict on time here.  I think that we all sitting up here, appreciated the candour of the submissions, but I think that maybe the issue of the role of the Land Bank needs to probed a bit more, because the impression that came across was that the Land Bank was part of the system of discrimination and part of this system of Apartheid.
 But there is another perspective on the Land Bank which actually argues that not only was it part, but it was actually quite essential, it was integral.  That one of the crucial issues in the emergence of Afrikaner Nationalism was the question of land.
 A complaint of Afrikaners often was that we may have the land, but we don't have the banks and we don't have the mines.  So that land therefore was a crucial part of capital mobilisation - of resource from which agricultural - from which Afrikaner capital could launch into other sectors of the economy.  The SANLAMS and the VOLKSKAS in their submissions often attribute the first sources of capital is from land and therefore the Land Bank was critical in allowing Afrikaner Agriculture to development and therefore to spread into other areas of the economy.
 Now, how would you respond to that kind of perspective;  that only a part, but a actual essence in some ways of the way in which Afrikaners were able to establish a strong stake in the South African economy.

DR DULNY: Family ask me how old is the Land Bank and I said it was formed in 1912.  I think that answers the question.  It is saying here as when the land lords were being implemented.

RUSSELL ALLY: I don't know.  Is that a case for the prosecution or the defense?
 The reason that I actually asked that question was not to want to put the Land Bank in the dock, but rather because one of the big issues that we are confronted with is the question of reparation and I think that you in the Land Bank are also - obviously that is a preoccupation, the question of righting the wrongs.
 But I think that one can only really right the wrongs if one understands the magnitude and if one has an appreciation of the instruments which were actually used to inflict the wrongs, otherwise I think there is the danger that one just glides over them and that one ends up with a almost sanitised diversion of the past.  Oh, the Land Bank was just part of and we apologise, when in reality it was a lot more and therefore if we are going to take serious the question of reparations, it has to do a lot more;  that one of the key aspects of Apartheid was that it was never ad-hoc, it was deliberate, it was conscious, it was tenacious and I think that people at receiving end are wanting to know whether the addressing of the wrongs are going to be as tenacious and as concentrated and as conscious as opposed to (indistinct).
 So that brings me to the next question which is what is the Land Bank doing, because that I think is what many people out there would like to know?

MR JACK: I think before we go to what the Land Bank is doing now, I would like to agree with you that the Land Bank was not established, you know, as an event.  It was part of process.
 Hence, I think I would refer to you the document, one of the documents that Dr Dulny referred to, which traces the economic history of why the Land Bank had to be established, what mechanisms were used to create access, you know, to White farmers.  Those who did not even have security in terms of getting the loans.
 So of all of those are documented and we are aware of them.  Hence, in our approaches in terms of transformation, we would be looking at those and I think it's also the reason why you do find that there is a resistance in terms of the transformation process from some quarters, because it is known that we would also want to reverse the process, such that it can be part and parcel of the reparation process.