The government will not abandon its aim of transferring 30% of land to black owners because failure to redistribute posed the risk of Zimbabwe-style polarisation, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform Gugile Nkwinti said on Tuesday.

"We remain obsessed with 30%. The issue has a great potential for polarisation," Nkwinti told a media briefing by Cabinet's economic and employment cluster.

He confirmed a statement by the Director General of the department, Thozi Gwanya, last week that the government realised it would not be able to achieve its target of transferring 30% of land to black owners by 2014.

So far only about 5% has been redistributed.

Gwanya told Business Day that the government was thinking of extending its deadline to 2025 due to a lack of funding made worse by the recession.

He said R71-billion would have been needed to buy outstanding land by 2014, but Treasury had asked the department to revise its request of an additional R18-billion over three years to a more realistic sum.

Nkwinti said his ministry had not yet made it formal policy to shift the deadline to 2025 but was looking into the matter.

He said the government was aware that it could never move swiftly enough to address expectations on land reform but believed that people wanted to know that the state was aware of their problems.

The minister reiterated that the state's "willing buyer, willing seller" model of land reform did not work.