Land politics in the new state organisation in South Africa

Abstract

In a study of land politics carried out from 2001 to 2005 in the two western provinces of South Africa, the Northern Cape and the Western Cape, a high degree of distrust was recorded between institutions in the provincial government. This article attempts to explain the distrust and how it affected the role of the land state in land reform in the two provinces. The analysis is developed from an institutional political science perspective. The findings are that the distrust does not threaten the democratic character of the new state but that it seriously hampers the efficiency of the government in land redistribution and the supply of infrastructure relevant to productive activities on newly settled land. The article describes how government focus on commercial farming affects the land state's relations to multiple livelihood communities on communal land and suggests that a post-liberation policy regression in the African National Congress explains part of the urban–commercial bias in land reform.

1. INTRODUCTION: DISTRUST IN THE PROVINCIAL LAND STATE

From 2000 to 2003 an investigation of land politics in western South Africa was carried out in cooperation with the University of the Western Cape and the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. A research team interviewed informants in Saron and Paulshoek and in the legislatures and land bureaucracies in the two provinces. A questionnaire was distributed to land-engaged politicians and bureaucrats in the two provinces. The politicians were selected from the provincial legislatures; the bureaucrats from the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) and from the Department of Agriculture (DoA). The last set of responses was received from the Department of Land Affairs in 2005. There were 66 responses in all, distributed as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 : The respondents, the public land elite

	Northern Cape	Western Cape	Total
Politicians	10	17	27
Bureaucrats	25	14	39
In all	35	31	66

It was found that trust relations between provincial government institutions in the Northern Cape and the Western Cape were at a low level. The members of the main political parties were more enemies than legitimate players in a democratic process. Of 15 Western Cape politicians (members of the provincial legislature), 12 reported that they saw the other main party, either the African National Congress (ANC) or the Democratic Alliance of the New National Party and the Democratic Party, as a destructive actor in provincial politics. In the Northern Cape Province, 8 out of the 10 respondents answered the question about party relations, and five out of the eight said the same thing: that the other main party was a destructive, illegitimate actor in provincial politics.

The politicians engaged in land reform distrusted the provincial land bureaucracies. One-half of the Northern Cape politicians described the DLA and the DoA as weak institutions. Five out of nine politicians here said the DLA was weak; 6 out of 10 said the DoA was weak. Thirteen out of 16 politicians in the Western Cape said the DLA was weak; and 14 out of 16 that the DoA was weak. The politicians were hardly happier about the cooperation between the two provincial bureaucracies. Six out of nine politicians in the Northern Cape and 7 out of 16 in the Western Cape said the relation between the two departments was in need of ‘much improvement’.

The public land elite (i.e. the 66 provincial politicians and bureaucrats engaged in land reform who were selected for this study) distrusted the modern economy – or the first economy institutions in land reform.1 In their ranking of 10 defined stakeholders, from the most to the least supportive of land reform, they rated the institutions of the modern urban industrial economy and the international donors as the least supportive. They rated the least commercialised stakeholders as the most supportive: farm workers' organisations, poor rural subsistence producers, and non-governmental organisations (see Table 2).

Table 2: Public land elite's ranking of stakeholders in land, from most (1) to least (10) supportive of land reform

Rank	Stakeholder
1	Farm workers' organisations
2	Subsistence producers
3	Non-governmental organisations
4	Farm workers
5	Commercial farmers
6	Commercial farmers' organisations
7	Labour unions
8	Financial institutions
9	International donors
10	Industrial employers' organisations

These data tell of an internal fragmentation of the state based on distrust and even enmity between provincial state institutions, and between them and especially the urban/international stakeholders in land (Table 2, Ranks 8, 9 and 10). That fragmentation can explain some of the slow pace of land redistribution in South Africa (Gran, 2007).

The fragmentation of the South African state both under apartheid (Evans, 1997) and in the new democratic state under ANC leadership has been studied under the heading of ‘intergovernmental relations’ (Levy & Tapscott, 2001). The apartheid state was fragmented because apartheid was a ‘fire station’ crisis project from the beginning: in effect, the white ruling class and the apartheid state lacked legitimacy and were regularly attacked by angry and insulted Africans, making the apartheid state a crisis state, continually in a multi-front warfare mode. However, each institution had to handle its specific area of struggles more or less on its own (Evans, 1997). It was a bifurcated state (Mamdani, 1996): one arm of it running the urban communities, industry, finance and the commercial farms through a corporate, quasi-democratic arrangement; and the other arm, through the Department of Native Affairs, running the rural areas through a system of indirect rule, through the local co-opted chiefs and traditional leaders. The purpose was to flush human resources, mainly labour, from the rural areas into white-controlled industry and services, and back to the labour reserves when labour was not needed or when the reserves could supplement its upkeep, free of charge for employers.

In the new democratic state there are many reasons for continued fragmentation: the class enmity; the presence of displeased professionals, bureaucrats and politicians inside the new state not eager to integrate, but rather to exit, or ‘prove’ that the new state under the ANC is doomed to mismanage; institutions from apartheid that are marginally reformed; many new politicians and bureaucrats unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of democratic politics and administration; and the temptation of many ANC members working in the state to take on much better paid jobs in the private sector. A finding of the study was that distrust and fragmentation were less severe in the Western Cape, where the opposition to the ANC was in power at the time the data were collected. Distrust and fragmentation were stronger in the Northern Cape provincial government, where the ANC had a secure and strong majority in the provincial legislature. This difference suggests that a powerful opposition can generate a more coherent and trusting state institution, even when a powerful opposition was neither needed, wanted or intended by the ruling party.

2. AN INSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE ON THE FRAGMENTED STATE

Can an institutional political science (IPS) perspective contribute insights into the fragmentation and related distrust in the two provincial governments in South Africa? I first specify the IPS perspective and then return to the facts of land politics and land reform.

To use an IPS perspective on South Africa is to focus on politics at three levels: in the sense of South Africa as a sovereign nation-state with borders and therefore with deep differences to other states, as state organisation and institution building in the country, and in the sense of policy-making and policy implementation. At the second level a major question is what are the conditions and power formations that typically produce democracies? At the policy level, important questions are how the relations between elected and appointed institutions, between parliaments and bureaucracies in democracies, and the distribution of power between them affect policy and policy implementation. How does knowledge affect policy? Knowledge institutions such as universities, bureaucracies and private firms are typically seen as apolitical, although they are powerful and influence politics. Trust is affected by processes at all three levels: processes determined by the fact that South Africa is a nation-state, creating national identities and enmity towards others, by the fact that the state quite recently took on a democratic form, and by the distribution of power and struggles between parliaments and the bureaucracy.

Institutionalism suggests that how we see the world, how we think and how we relate to others through our actions are influenced by our institutional identifications and memberships. Institutions are basically rule systems developed through reiterated agreements. Agreements and promises create obligations and collective intentions.

A wage agreement, for example, is an agreement in the institutional field of firms in markets. It implies a collective intention to make the firm work. It implies obligations: for the owner to manage and pay the workers, and for the workers to work. It influences identities, the owner–manager–worker identities. It contains norms for behaviour, for use of time, for management, and so on. However, institutions such as wage labour do not determine specifically what people do (Searle, 2001). There is an element of freedom between the conscious, rational person and the institution, the agreement. The wage is first an offer. It has to be promised and accepted. The worker and the owner can at any time exit from the agreement (with varying ease and consequences). While in the agreement, it is continually evaluated. If the owner misbehaves, the status of the agreement is lowered in the opinion of the workers, and vice versa.

In this sense, the institutional perspective implies that institutions are built through agreements. The agreements create collective intentions (i.e. ‘we have agreed’). The status of the agreements is continually evaluated through practice by all parties to the agreement. Any person usually acts in a maze of agreements, obligations and institutions. The IPS perspective implies that institutions deliver materials to the acting person. There is an element of freedom and therefore of personal/group responsibility in the chosen act (except when external force or physical disability eliminates the faculty of rationality). The institutional model of action is depicted in Figure 1, with the responsible rational person between the institutional rules and obligations and the chosen act. There is reason to believe that a person who has entered freely into the agreements of an institution will act in a manner appropriate to the norms and rules of the institution (March & Olsen, 2006). But there is no reason to assume that institutions eliminate the gap between rules and action. Even the most established routines contain the gap, the element of freedom and therefore the possibility of rational and irrational action relative to the routines. Rational actions imply such not-rule-regulated gaps.

Figure 1: The institutional perspective

It is in this perspective of freedom in a maze or a web of different institutions that the land reform policy and the trust materials will be interpreted. It is in the time-space between our commitments that our faculty of rationality is activated, where we develop desire-independent but commitment-relevant reasons for acting. The IPS perspective challenges the idea that identities bind us to certain rules, that rational action is rule-dependent, and that politics for that reason primarily is a power struggle between institutions without freedom for the actors. The IPS perspective challenges the idea of persons or functional groups as primarily preference-determined utility maximisers.

3. NATION-STATE ORGANISATION AND TRUST RELATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA

3.1 Trust relations in nation-states

Seen from an historical perspective, nation-states are not friendly institutions. Nation-states emerged in Europe from about 1500 (Tilly, 1990). They were, for a large part, violent centralised institutions for control of land. Gradually they transformed Europe from feudalism to princely states and lastly to an agglomeration of similar nation-states more or less in a balance of powers. Empires continued to rule on other continents, as the Soviet Union, in China and after World War II in the American empire through markets.

The nation-state has three constitutional characteristics.

1. It demands sovereignty over its territory; that is, it demands the sole right to organise, control and exploit all activity within the territory. If people living in the territory have rights, those rights are fought for and assigned by the state. If organisations outside the territory have rights within the territory, those rights are explicitly assigned/accepted by the host state.

2. The nation-state typically establishes a distinction between public and private institutions, or between two sectors or spheres, the public and the private sphere, or between state and society. Historically that separation of state from society was part of the process of liberating Europe from feudalism. In the feudal estates, private property and political power were one (held and managed by the land owner). With industrial property in products, machinery and technology wresting itself free from feudal control of land and agriculture, new rulers suggested that private property could function better in a society with a separate and limited state (the liberal view). The state was public – the society was a sphere for private property, individual freedom and responsibility. The new nation-states accepted and protected privately owned firms that employed new technology and wage labour to produce products and services distributed through markets. Families and individuals were in the private sphere, which allowed them a degree of freedom that had not existed in the feudal estates. That freedom was important for the development of voluntary organisations, science, innovations and autonomous capital-producing firms. It was important for the development of a new conception of the self, of the person as an autonomous and responsible actor in society. Despite the separation, the nation-state assumed its sovereignty over the whole territory and all life on that territory.

3. A nation-state still demands a monopoly of legitimate organisation and use of violence in its society, within its territory, or the sole right to organise soldiers. That monopoly identifies the character of the nation-state. It is contested, it is under pressure for change, but it is still solidly in place.

These traits give nation-states the two faces of Janus. One is the historically established sphere of private individual and organisational freedom, and therefore individual responsibility and self-respect. That freedom can be used to elect and depose rulers and to demand the rule of law. The other is the nation-state's violent character. That violence can be directed toward invaders, towards other states and towards the state's own citizens. A nation-state does not allow people to opt for a new nation-state within its boundaries. Such a project will be met with state-organised suppression. When a nation-state collapses, a new one usually takes its place. In this sense, a nation-state is basically a monopolistic, undemocratic and dangerous institution. It defines citizenship within its boundaries but does not see itself as a citizen of the larger world; for example, in organisations such as the European Union, the African Union or the United Nations. The idea of majority rule accepted by citizens in democracies has a tenuous existence in interstate relations. That lack of state citizenship makes global markets autonomous.

Nation-states have historically been dynamic institutions. Their mission in Europe was to transform feudalism. They established the public–private divide and transformed the economies from systems of subsistence agriculture to systems of capital-producing industry. In some states, rule became democratic. Elected parliaments ruled over bureaucracies, including military bureaucracies, through law. Authoritarian rule was common when parliaments were weak. However, European democracies could all the same colonise large parts of the world. Such democracies could be transformed back to authoritarian and dictatorial systems. The democratic form of the nation-state is tenuous because the nation-state is basically an authoritarian construction. Nation-states represent an extreme form of private property. They demand sovereignty over a territory and all activities on it. Perhaps we can say that, in many Third World countries, systems of personal, family and ethnic rule have survived liberation from colonialism because colonial rule, even by the most democratic of European states, excluded any major practice of democracy, any basic respect for human rights.

3.2 The four dynamics of nation-states

Nation-states were, in contrast to feudal rule, dynamic constructions. The IPS perspective distinguishes four such dynamics: marginalisation, deconstruction, integration, and domination. In Norway, the nation-state meant deconstruction of subsistence agriculture and marine production, the integration of thus ‘liberated’ people into the ranks of wage labour in capital-producing firms in industry, farming/fishing and services, and the gradual emergence through struggle, of the democratic form of the state. Parliament struggled from 1814 to 1884 with the parallel power of (the Swedish) king and his bureaucracy. By 1905, parliament (the Storting) was in control of the state. Equal voting rights for men and women were established in 1913. Capitalist innovation and wage labour dominated the economy by the 1920s. A major class compromise after World War II ushered in the welfare state; that is, a state obliged to continue developing the capitalist market economy and, as a product of the pressure from the labour movement (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992; Gran, 1994), state responsibility for reasonable living conditions for all citizens, whether they were inside or outside markets, in or out of hospitals, young or old, and so on. It has been argued that the class compromise was beneficial both for the capitalist economy and for improving living conditions and self-respect for all.

In South Africa, the four dynamics were all the more powerful, all the more brutal. Colonialism deconstructed and eliminated the African modes of agriculture and manufacture and violently expropriated most of the productive land from African peoples (Terreblanche, 2002). Integration was organised according to the capital owner–wage worker relationship and on the racial distinctions. Workers were flushed from the rural areas into industry through indirect rule. Integration was implemented through migrant labour, which ensured racial separation (Mamdani, 1996). The physical separation and the homelands idea made it possible to deny citizen rights to black Africans. The domination was dictatorial and violent right up to the point of liberation in 1990. Both Norway and South Africa are nation-states emanating from elite control of territory. Both established the public–private separation. However, the state organisation developed differently. There has been a slow but continuous development of democracy in Norway since the independent nation-state's halting inception in 1814. South Africa experienced authoritarian rule under expanding colonisation from the mid-fifteenth century, independence as a republic controlled by the white minority from 1910, apartheid's dictatorial and totalitarian rule from 1948 to 1990, an emerging democracy from 1990, ANC majority rule from 1994, and a radically democratic Constitution from 1996.

The distrust between the provincial state institutions and between them and stakeholders in land expressed by the respondents in this study was not necessarily distrust of the emerging South African democracy. The distrust could have deeper roots, based in widespread fear of the colonisers' nation-state order in South Africa. Even the democratic nation-state has many not-democratic institutions without elected leaderships. Examples are the bureaucracy, the schools and universities, the military and the privately owned farms and firms. The democratic state does not eliminate the not-elected institutions and organisations. Rather it depends on them, for order, education, infrastructure, income, and so on. It protects them. The point of the democratic state is to regulate the private sphere so that it conforms to civilised, legitimate norms and rules for public and private activity. Because of the nation-state logic, the democratic form of state depends on a continual mobilisation of support and opposition to elected and appointed rulers. If that mobilisation disappears, if the value struggle between the public and private spheres and within the democratic state itself subsides, the authoritarianism of the primordial nation-state institution will very probably reappear (Gran, 2005b).

4. LAND REFORM

4.1 Land, a fictitious commodity

Land has a constitutive role in the formation of the nation-state. Sovereignty implies ownership/full control of a territory. A territory is a sine qua non of the nation-state. Who individually owns and can use the various pieces of land is a product of state/government regulation. The state, persons and groups/communities have, with the new Constitution, equal legal access to own land and to treat land as a commodity. Land can be defined as a commodity at the regulatory but not at the state-constitutive level. In markets, land is a commodity. Outside markets, land is not a commodity.2 Karl Polanyi (1944) called land (and labour and capital) a fictitious commodity. Land, labour and investments are the basic constitutive resources of any society, he argued. How they are developed and organised is the social and cultural texture of any society. Feudalism was deconstructed by the system of nation-states. The relations between land, labour and investments were radically reorganised. Apartheid had to give in to democracy because the construction of white ownership of land, labour as migrant labour and investments primarily in urban industry and large-scale farming was untenable. Democracy implies a fair distribution of land. The problem of the land reform programme is whether and when that fairness is attained.

However, the new power of markets and unequal distribution of capital in them limits the scope of democratic management of land. The amount of all land that is commoditised affects the scope of democratic power. Therefore, the commoditisation of communally held land in favour of emerging black farmers, which is part of the land reform programme, is a contradictory intervention. It favours commercial black-controlled farming. But if successful it also expands markets and limits the amount of land available for direct democratic management. At the regulatory level, commoditisation of communally held land is a basic transformation. If commoditisation reproduces the colonially skewed distribution of land, where some 50 000 white farmers owned some 80 per cent of agricultural land, this limits the power of democratic institutions – even more if that skewed ownership does not benefit the least well-off (Rawls, 1999). Democracy, the rule of law through elected parliaments and the presence of real opposition to elected and non-elected rulers, implies that the people, and not the state or the private elite, own all the land and that it should be distributed fairly, with attention given to the various public–private functions performed on it. A democratic nation-state that does not distribute land fairly will be a distrusted state. The redistribution is all the more important because the nation-state has its structure, its basic logic and legitimacy in the sovereignty over all the land. Any government has in this sense power to radically redistribute land. The IPS perspective suggests that the more limited the popular control of the state, the more the state elite through not-democratic institutions will control land. Without that democratic mobilisation and control, the primordial nation-state logic will permeate into democracy and most likely change it back to an authoritarian form.

In the Mbeki (2008) State of the Nation address, new elements in the land reform programme were mentioned: an agreement with the South African Local Government Association ‘to place a moratorium on the sale of land that can be availed for housing programmes’; bringing together institutions of the triple helix of government, non-governmental organisations, science/education and business in a concerted War Against Poverty; expanding the Micro-Agricultural Finance Initiative of South Africa; and more support for cooperatives and especially small and medium-sized enterprises led by women. Ambitions were expanded, but nothing was said about the need for political, voluntary association and trade-union mobilisation in the rural areas if the ambitions were to be implemented.

4.2 The four nation-state dynamics in land reform

How did the dynamics of marginalisation, deconstruction, differentiation and integration work in the field of land reform in western South Africa?

Apartheid marginalised the living conditions of rural Africans. The ANC three-step policy of commercialisation of rural land does the same – in practice if not in intention. The ANC three-step policy is: first priority to urban–industrial modern-sector development, profits from the developed modern economy used to invest in emerging black commercial agriculture, and, finally, profits from the modern economy used for welfare for people who are not able to exploit markets.3 In the 2008 State of the Nation address, Mbeki reiterated that basic ANC policy remained; the problems were related to implementation:

We speak of Business Unusual not referring to any changes in our established policies but with regard to the speedy, efficient and effective implementation of these policies and programs. (Mbeki, 2008:3)

The people living and working on communally held land and natural resources, often for historical reasons in dire poverty, were marginalised as a consequence of this three-step ‘trickle down’ theory. In Paulshoek and Saron, investments in infrastructure and new commercial farms were hardly visible in 2001. By 2007, welfare had improved in both towns and workers had gained ownership status in a commercial farm in Saron. However, corruption was reported to our research team on both the first and second visits.

Apartheid was a regime for private (white) property in the rural areas. The ANC land reform programme assigns priority to the same ownership format. Both regimes, in different ways, set out to deconstruct the livelihoods and authority systems on communally held land in favour of commercial production. Marginalisation through lack of attention and failure to assign status to multiple livelihoods on communally held land is the first deconstructive step. Active deconstruction is implemented through public interventions favouring private commercial activity and institutions supportive of that activity. Examples of such institutions are schools teaching or developing only ‘modern’ scientific knowledge and ignoring local experience-based knowledge, registration of values in monetary terms rather than exchange in terms of use values, and welfare payments rather than public physical and social services to people in need. In large-scale farming the ANC government gave priority to deconstructing the inherited corporate public management of land and agro-business, favouring free competition, rationalisation of farm organisation, minimum wage levels, and the introduction of modern technology and internationalisation.

This radical change of policy and organisation shocked many of the commercial farmers. Adjustment to free market competition was difficult. Farm workers were sacked. Large but marginal farms went bankrupt. There had been little cooperation between commercial farmers and labour-supplying communities like Paulshoek and Saron under apartheid, and now it became even more difficult under the new ANC commercialisation and free markets policy. Emerging black farmers who had obtained land were connected into commercial farmer networks. But such emerging farmers within the migrant labour communities could affect the rest of the community negatively. The deconstruction and lack of infrastructural support to the multiple livelihood communities favoured capitalist class formations in the rural areas. This meant reorganising the racially segregated education system to make it a united, standardised modern system of schools, colleges, technikons4 and universities. Standardisation threatened the codification and dissemination of local knowledge, and the exploitation of tacit knowledge of rational land use in the multiple-livelihood communities. The suppression of local knowledge deconstructed socio-cultural systems that were important for people in the rural areas. It generated anger and distrust of the system.

4.3 Explaining trust relations in land management

How do the dynamic processes of nation-state organisation help us explain the registered distrust in the new land state, the distrust between political parties, between politicians and bureaucrats, and between the public land elite and the urban–industrial stakeholders in land?

The deep distrust between the main political parties, as expressed by many of the 27 politicians interviewed, was a signal that, below the level of general acceptance of the Mandela–de Klerk-negotiated peaceful transition to a democratic constitution, enmity lingers on. That enmity limits the will to compromise. It in part explains the corruption culture. The system has low legitimacy. Many saw apartheid as legalised corruption.

A second observation was the provincial politicians' distrust of the land bureaucracy. Understanding the nature of the relationship between politicians and public bureaucrats in nation-states can help explain that distrust. Because the nation-state demands sovereignty over its territory, the nation-state project is a complex whole. Inter-state systems of management and the idea of an international community with rights of intervention are now emerging, but generally states have been, and still are, set to manage all of their activities on their own. This autonomy demands a multiplicity of specialised institutions and therefore specialised technical, social, economic and political knowledge. On the one hand, the public–private divide is conducive to the development of technical knowledge in the private sector through independent research, competition between firms in markets, and inter-state competition. The nation-state organisation assigns freedom to private firms, implying freedom to employ, organise, retain profits and develop technology. Because of this complexity and inter-state competition and warfare, the nation-state system eliminated small states, since they could not generate the needed specialisation of knowledge and institutions and therefore lacked the power to uphold sovereignty in the inter-state struggle. The land bureaucracies were large in control of complex knowledge of land use. The parliaments were small, new organisations confronted with the huge task of gaining control and leadership over the bureaucratic institutions.

Large empires also suffered from a disadvantage: the needed specialisation and differentiation was difficult to manage across large distances. As the private sector specialised, the demand for specialised knowledge increased and differentiation continued. State institutions for order and sovereignty, the police and the military, were supplemented by state institutions for the development and management of infrastructure, such as roads, waterways, railways, telecommunication, schools and universities, medical services and military structures. An increasing number of professions were engaged in the management of public-sector and private-sector activities (Appiah et al., 2004). The state typically has a section for leadership (parliaments and governments) and a section for applying knowledge in politics and production (bureaucracies and firms). Investigations (Gran, 2005b) have shown that there is a continual power struggle between the political and bureaucratic institutions of the state. In periods of value struggle in society, the political structures take more control over the bureaucracy. That task was daunting in South Africa around 2000. In such settings government usually demands loyal bureaucrats. If it is a new political regime it might eliminate old regime bureaucrats if governments have that power (cf. Norway in the 1880s and Zimbabwe in the 1980s). In periods of value harmony in the larger society (whether a genuine or managed harmony), the opposite process unfolds: the power of the professionalised bureaucracy is augmented. Bureaucratic professional power permeates into the political leadership, and the interests of bureaucrats in stability, high status and good pay permeate into politics. The idea of rapid reconciliation (harmony) could allow for such an augmentation of professional bureaucratic power in the state.

Value struggle is the current situation in South Africa in 2008. Therefore the theory suggests that the ANC will concentrate political power in the state and demand loyalty rather than scientific analyses and independence from the bureaucrats. This could help explain the provincial politicians' distrust of the land bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were too independent. The problem with a concentration of political power in a period of value controversy is that the recognition and production of new knowledge can be hampered. Politics eliminates independent knowledge production. Concentration of power in central government around the modern urban project can hamper the development and codification/understanding of livelihood systems in the marginalised rural areas. One advantage of a functioning democratic form of government is its ability to keep alive the struggle between political programmes and scientific knowledge of how policy works. Democratic political institutions will typically mirror both the value homogeneity and the value conflicts in the larger society, making sure that a political regime cannot eliminate opposition completely and cannot turn the public bureaucracy into a unified, loyal machinery designed to implement only the government's chosen regulatory policy.

A third and last observation was the distrust between the public land elite and the urban–commercial stakeholders in land. The land elites were loyal to the ANC Government's Land Redistribution and Development policy, which gave priority to emerging black farmers on technically modern and commercially viable farms. However, the elites were at the same time conscious of the complexities involved in rural development. Parts of the elite saw the importance of infrastructural support for poor people struggling to survive on communal lands. Government land policy gave priority to market-directed production. The DoA at Elsenburg in the Western Cape assigned low priority to the Reconstruction and Development Programme, the land reform offices and the extension workers engaged in supporting peasants in communities on communal land (Gran, 1997, 2007). However, the knowledge about and the engagement in improving rural livelihoods were present, on the periphery of the DoA.

The public land elites saw their own organisation, the state organisation, as a major barrier to more effective land reform. Members of the elites spoke frankly about that barrier. Some said the state should support all sections of the rural population, under a vision of careful rural–urban development of the new democratic society. The politicians did not trust the land bureaucracy. However, the study indicated that the land bureaucracy was more knowledgeable of local infrastructural conditions and needs in poor communities than the politicians were.

Such knowledge in the land bureaucracies can explain the public land elite's view that the least commercialised stakeholders were the most supportive of land reform, (cf. the ranking from 1 to 10 in Table 2). If these data are valid and interpreted correctly,5 they tell of an important function of the provincial level of government in the new democratic state in South Africa. The power structures active at the provincial level were specific to the region. The land elites had place-specific knowledge that was more precise, more diversified than knowledge of land conditions at the national level. Being close to a community makes it more difficult to offer dogmatic support to only a section of that community (emerging farmers).

Politicians at the provincial level were closer to policy implementation. The study recorded the opinions of a provincial public land elite acting in a complex web of grounded institutions. Members of the elite had obligations in various institutions and communities. Determining how to act was for that reason a choice in a maze of obligations. The choices made could in no simple sense be deducted from a (government) dogma, a rule or from the norms set by one institution. The members made decisions in the maze of demands and obligations specific to each. The outcome was a provincial land elite loyal to the national government, giving priority to commercialisation, critical of the fragmentation and distrust–enmity relations in the state, and engaged collectively in a multifaceted development activity in both private commercial and communal livelihoods. The public land elite emerged as an independent, knowledgeable and responsible formation of actors in the new democratic process in South Africa. However, the Saron and Paulshoek investigations told of both corruption and limited effects at the ground level of provincial land projects. Overall, the conclusion was that the provincial land state was an independent democratic and professional mediator between the national level and the local level in the land reform programme.

5. CONCLUSION – THE ANC'S POLICY REGRESSION FROM LIBERATION MOVEMENT TO GOVERNMENT

The contribution of the IPS perspective is twofold. It provides the analytical distinction between nation-states as a primordial format of politics and the internal organisation of such states, varying from dictatorial through authoritarian to democratic forms. It contributes the idea that people act freely and with power between and through institutions. Institutions do not determine what people do; institutions and organisations deliver materials for rational, obligation-based actions. Institutions empower. They are constructive but technology-dependent manifestations of human culture and power.

The IPS perspective applied to the data on the provincial public land elites in western South Africa produced a picture of dire mistrust between institutions but a land state relatively competent in reforming living and working conditions in both rich and poor rural areas. The leadership of the land state (i.e. the institutions engaged in land management, the provincial land elite) was loyal to the government in both provinces. The elites were independent of government and critically self-conscious. The study disclosed a fragmented state with serious distrust and enmity between both actors and organisations. It disclosed a public competence in land administration that was devalued through the national government focus on commercialisation of land and redistribution of land through markets. The elites and the provincial public institutions had a wider spectrum of development competencies than those activated by the Land Redistribution and Development programme for rural development.

The investigation disclosed what may be termed a post-liberation policy regression in the ANC. The ANC-become-government took socially and politically a step backwards compared with its Reconstruction and Development Programme developed during and published at the end of the liberation struggle. One manifestation of the regression was the slow pace of land redistribution. From the ANC's liberation focus on returning land to the common people, the ANC as government assigned priority to urban–commercial development as specified in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme and the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative South Africa programme. The ANC used the three-step, trickle-down argument for development. The new democratic form of the nation-state can itself in part explain the slow pace of land reform. Democracy means political space for opposition. In South Africa after liberation, the New National Party–Democratic Alliance opposition could muster one-third of the electorate. Members or supporters of that opposition controlled most of the modern farming, mining and finance economy. That meant an asymmetry of power between state and society. The ANC had the votes, the opposition controlled the economy. Instead of using voting power to penetrate/regulate the economy, the ANC chose a social move backwards, making the middle class its prime constituency and regressing politically to the trickle-down theory: urban modern development first into global markets, and, from the outcome, rural economic and social development.

The regression developed over time: despite the electoral majority, the new ANC government was pressured towards and consciously gave priority to the development of the urban modern economy. That policy marginalised the existing livelihood systems and their improvement in the poor rural communities where the ANC's majority constituency was located. For that reason the ANC became politically opaque: rhetorically a pro-poor black African movement, practically a political–technical manager of the modern urban economy. The African majority's trust in the government was for that reason reduced. The rural poor had to wait. The regression generated centralisation of government power. Trust relations were fragmented. Trust once again became group specific, limited to ‘one's own people’. The movement towards generalised trust was aborted. The difficult liberalisation and rationalisation of the economy and the slow professionalisation of the bureaucracy frustrated many. More distrust, criticisms and overt opposition fed into the centralisation of power in government. From a position of high trust in the early 1990s, the post-liberation ANC government regressed to a low-trust mediator of privatisation and commercialisation in the crucial and culturally sensitive field of land reform. The land reform policy of giving more land to emerging black farming is pro-modern. The demand for more land for public and private purposes, especially on communally held land, was at the same time strong in the large rural African migrant worker population.

Did the national ANC government heed the demand? When the vigilance of opposition movements in democratic nation-states is reduced, the primordial nation-state logic re-emerges. That logic is authoritarian. The two public land elites at the provincial level in the Northern Cape and the Western Cape became moderating and mediating elites between state and society, between central and local government. It was a level of government that the oppositions to the ANC valued. It was not free from corruption but it did voice strong and weaker demands for land and infrastructural support for livelihood communities in the rural areas. The study recorded scepticism in the ANC towards the provincial level of government as such. The provincial level of government was in this sense important for the gradual democratisation of the new South African state and for directing more of the land reform towards the majority of Africans in the rural areas.

This paper is an analysis of selected data on trust relations between the main post-liberation political parties, in the two provincial governments of the Northern Cape and the Western Cape in South Africa, and between them and stakeholders in land. The data presented here have been abstracted from the author's fieldwork and from presentations by the author in Public Administration and Development (2007; vol. 27, pp. 1–13). Odd-Helge Fjeldstad was the Christian Michelsen Institute colleague in the project. Research was funded by NUFU: Norwegion Programme for Development, Research on Education, grant no. PRO 18/98.

Notes

¹The terms ‘first and second’ and ‘formal and informal’ economy are discussed in Dewey et al. (2006). The discussion touches on the subsistence-oriented and capital-producing systems, distinguished in the present study. The thesis here is that capital production marginalises and finally deconstructs systems built on subsistence-oriented production, or what in anthropological literature (Cousins, 2007) is referred to as multiple livelihood systems on communal land. The thesis is that a land reform policy alternative is to develop both systems and to allow or support a soft integration of the two.

²See Benjaminsen and Sjaastad (2008) on how formal mapping generates privatisation of communal land in Namaqualand.

³‘At the same time, we must continue to focus on the growth, development, and modernisation of the First Economy to generate the resources without which it will not be possible to confront the challenges of the Second Economy’ (Mbeki, 2004:10); ‘Apex priorities … accelerating economic growth and development … improving the effectiveness of our interventions directed at the Second Economy and poverty eradication …’ (Mbeki, 2008:3).

⁴Now redesignated ‘universities of technology’.

⁵At the time of writing – 2008 – the data are available for scrutiny at the Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen physically, and in the form of a data matrix on the NSDstat statistical program.