The RDP introduces the integrated socio-economic policy framework aimed at exterminating the legacies of the past inequalities and building vibrant and democratic South Africa. According to Kloppers and Pienaar, the introduction of RDP was influenced by extreme poverty and inequalities. Furthermore, to deal with impoverishment and intense dispassion from land, the programme RDP identified challenges such as lack of adequate houses, landlessness, hunger and starvation that needed to be addressed and many more challenges that affects blacks were also addressed. This included the provision of land and housing, as well as access to safe water and sanitation. It is apparent that land dispossession did not only deprive Black people of land, but it also deprived them of their basic human rights, rights to adequate housing without access to land it is impossible to achieve and enjoy this right, including right to safe water and sanitation while living in overcrowded nonarable land. Poverty was an ultimate outcome for blacks, and it could not have been avoided, considering that their only means of living was taken away from them.
According to RDP, land is the most basic need for rural dwellers,384 resulting from their forced removal and forced confinement to overcrowded and impoverished reserves, homelands and townships.385 The RDP made further provisions that there is a need to implement a fundamental land reform programme. A programme that is demand-driven and aims to source out land for housing and fruitful land to the rural area that comprise of the extremely poor and emergent farmers.386 As part of a comprehensive rural development programme, to increase profits and fruitful usage of land, and further promote the usage of land for agricultural, industrial and many other profitable and fruitful developmental activities, or residential purposes.387 However, the current challenges Black people are facing are not only the legacy of historical injustices or dispossession but a non- effective land reform programme aimed at redressing historical injustices. Land reform programme is creating more challenges than it is resolving. The core objective of land reform programme is to restore the social and economic status of Black people through restitution, secure tenure and redistribution of their dispossessed land. However, redistribution of land without adequate support services does not necessarily address the beneficiaries social and economic status, but merely gives beneficiaries possession of land with very limited resources to farm productively.
Kloppers and Pienaar assert that the RDP recognised that land signifies and is the source of the most basic needs for rural people, and there is a need to redress the racial discriminatory operations of the apartheid government. As a way to successfully deal with the problems: inequality, poverty, landlessness that resulted from the unjust and forced removals and the historical deprivation to access land, Kloppers et al. recommended the need for the establishment of a comprehensive national land reform programme.388 A land reform programme that seeks not only to redistribute, restore and change tenure security for the previously dispossessed people, but which also seeks to address the socio-economic status, welfare and basic human rights of black people. This ultimately means that land reform must be inter-linked with the objectives of alleviating poverty; this can be achieved through the productive use of land.
384 Reconstruction Development Programme, 1994, Chapter 2 Land Reform, pg 23.
385 Ibid note 384.
386 Reconstruction Development Programme, 1994, Chapter 2 Land Reform, pg 24.
387 Ibid note 386.
388 Kloppers et al. (n18).
According to RDP, the land redistribution programme is intended to accomplish its goal in numerous ways, inclusive of consolidating tightly property rights of communities already occupying land, combining market and non-market mechanisms to provide land, and using vacant government land to ensure that land is afforded to Black people particularly rural dwellers. The RDP makes further provisions that the democratic government bears the obligation to supply satisfactory financing for land redistribution.389 In addition, beneficiaries must pay in accordance with their means. Moreover, a land tax on rural land must be based on clear criteria: the contributions made annually by residents to the traditional leader for purposes of administration of land matters must be reasonably proportional to the work done; must help release underused land; must generate incomes for rural infrastructural development through collection of tax; and must promote the productive use of land through support services to aid beneficiaries to use land productively.390 However, these objectives are not necessarily achieved, due to unbalanced separation of powers of traditional leaders in administration of communal land. Traditional leaders are regarded as custodians of communal land and the only authoritative voice to issues regarding communal land.
Therefore, the lack of separation of powers hinders progressive developments in communal areas, unless approved by the traditional leader.
However, according to RDP, the land reform programme must cater for rural infrastructure such as industrial firms, support services such as transfer of skills, resources, funds mentoring, monitoring to land reform beneficiaries and training at all levels to make certain that land is used productively. Included in this, adequate water supply must occupy top position of the list of services provided, and the health care services should follow.391 Water is the basic need for humankind, and according to RDP, the provision of water should be made a priority; thus, the government should ensure installation of boreholes and pipes to all rural areas. Further ensure the building of clinics and hospitals to ensure access to health care to all. As a result, a safe rural water supply programme was intended to commence in the first year of the RDP.392 Boreholes and pipes were installed in almost all the rural communities, however, very few of those pipes and boreholes are still supplying the communities with water. This could be owing to poor maintenance of the boreholes or the
389 Reconstruction Development Programme (n384).
390 Ibid note 389.
391 Reconstruction Development Programme, 1994, Chapter 2 Land Reform, pg 25.
392 Ibid note 391.
water shortage which is a national crisis. Till to date, a number of communities are without safe water and people rely on water from rivers and wells.
The RDP further advocates for democratic regime to provide for the security of landowning rights for all South Africans by adopting a tenure policy that recognises the sundry systems of landowning that are there in South Africa. And further ensure that the land reform programme includes the provision of services such as skills transfer, funding and mentoring to land reform beneficiaries so that they can use their land as productively as possible.393 And furthermore, assistance must include support for local institution building by ensuring that all necessary institutions have satellite offices within the reach of local communities, so that communities can create reasonable and operative ways to assign and manage land.394 The land restitution is intended to compensate the suffering instigated by the policy of forced removals; hence the RDP tasked the democratic government to return land to South Africans dispossessed by discriminatory legislation since 1913, through the mechanism of a land claims court.395 The core functions of the land claims court is to adjudicate land matters and make a ruling regarding the matter before court. And ensure that there is compliance of laws regarding procedure and process of claims.