Nov 18, 2009

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's Land Claims Commission owes over 10 billion rand to beneficiaries and landowners for land it bought to give to blacks, the Business Day newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The commission, tasked with restoring to blacks land that was taken from them during apartheid, could not afford to pay about 8.8 billion rand in grants for post-settlement support to beneficiaries of the land restitution programme, the paper said.

The commission was also unable to pay 1.19 billion rand for land it bought because of a shortage of funds, while some land owners had gone to court to get the commission to pay 380 million rand for land it purchased from them, the Business Day said citing the commission's legal head, Thami Mdlalose.

The paper said the government had turned down the commission's request for an additional 10.3 billion rand for restitution over the next three years.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress-led government set itself a target of handing 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.

However, much of the land has not been used for farming and has lain idle for years, while the government is now considering pushing forward its deadline to 2025 in order to catch up with the huge backlog for land claims.

Land reform is a sensitive issue in South Africa and has been brought into focus by the decline in agriculture in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where white commercial farmers were often violently evicted by President Robert Mugabe's government.