Land Ownership Inequality and Land Claims
Eighty percent of farming land still remains in the hands of white farmers; the requirement that claimants for restoration of land seized during the apartheid era make a contribution towards the cost of the land "excludes the poorest layers of the population altogether", while a large number of white farmers have been murdered since 1994 (roughly 313 per 100 000 annually) in what campaign groups claim is a campaign of genocide. Human Rights Watch contend that the publicity given to these murders and attacks removes attention from the plight of poor black rural people, and contend that they are purely criminal in nature. Regardless, crime against white farmers receives strong media coverage. Opposition against land reforms fear that by removing commercial farmers from their land and dividing up the land to poor urbanized people with no comprehension of agriculture or agricultural management would lead to a state of famine like the one being experienced in Zimbabwe at the moment.
In Durban a large movement of shackdwellers has mobilized against city authorities claiming that popular attempts to desegregate the city in the 1980s are now being reversed by the mass eviction of shack dwellers.
Read more about this topic: Legacies Of Apartheid
Famous quotes containing the words land, ownership, inequality and/or claims:
“Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
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—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
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—Herman Melville (1819–1891)