Flipping through the papers this morning I happened onto a story that deserves not only it's own Facepalm cartoon for the day, but indeed an entry into the Facepalm of the year awards. The story revolves around a very sore issue in South Africa at the moment, namely that of land redistribution. Clearly land redistribution is a necessary but painful process, and one of the many processes required to sort out the wrongs of the past.

All that - no matter how discriminative and unfair it may be deemed by some - is acceptable to repair past damages. But herein lies the rub: it is one thing to buy fully functional farms from the so-called "previously advantaged" and transfer this into a consortium where qualified and competent farmers continue to grow the production of the farm, but it is an entirely different and infinitely more moronic thing to pass the farm off to a third party whose fingers are green from smoking too much weed.

The story mentions that since 1995 (when all this land redistribution policies started), the government has bought back 5.9 million hectares of farmland. This equates to I would imagine a few more than 100 farms. Ok, so that sounds like progress... But the progress is actually shrouded in utter failure. It has now come to light - and this is by admission of the Minister of Rural Development and Land Affairs directly - that 90% of this farmland has gone to waste. Ok, now you probably think I have made a typo and that that is just not possible, so I will retype it again: 90%. How the hell can 90% of farmland that was productive less than 15 years ago now be wasted?

Well, actually that is an easy one to answer: the person who took over the farm didn't farm. He probably didn't farm because he didn't know how to farm. Farming is not just tossing a few seeds in the ground, pissing on them and waiting for them to erupt into produce... today it is a high tech industry where farmers learn their trade in universities and specialised colleges. And they don't just learn how to grow a mealie and milk a cow, they learn how to milk the mealie and grow the cow efficiently too.
So now, 15 years on, the government has decided to throw good taxpayer money at these failed farms in an attempt to resuscitate them. R245 million straight out of the taxpayers back pocket. Chump change.

The thing is though; if you keep giving handouts then eventually the handouts will be expected. At some point the government needs to take stock and realise that just moving people around is not going to solve the land problem. It is going to create a bigger poverty problem though.