Certainty on property rights can only help to steady the ship

The new minister of agriculture, Senzeni Zokwana, made an astonishing confession this week.

The government's plan to limit the size of farms to 12000ha to speed up the redistribution of land to black farmers - announced by the ANC and confirmed by President Jacob Zuma during his State of the Nation speech - is nothing more than a negotiating tactic, Zokwana said.

"Whenever you are negotiating, you always put forward a figure. What informs the end of that figure is the process of negotiation," Reuters quoted Zokwana as saying on the sidelines of a conference organised by Grain SA.

The minister, a former president of the National Union of Mineworkers and a Communist Party heavyweight, knows a thing or two about negotiations.

After the damage done by Zuma's populist pledges on land - the president also told the nation that a plan, widely condemned as fatally flawed, to force commercial farmers to cede half of their land to their workers was still on the table - Zokwana might have been doing a spot of damage control.

Noting that, whatever the ceiling put on land ownership, farmers would still be able to lease more land from the state, Zokwana said a balance needed to be struck between food security and the transformation of agriculture.

Zuma would have done the country a favour by exchanging ideas with Zokwana before playing to the gallery.

It beggars belief that, at a time when we are desperate for investment to kick-start our spluttering economy and create jobs, the president threatens to unravel property rights.

Investors require certainty. Remove that and they will put their money elsewhere, probably in the fast-growing economies north of the border.

Land reform has to be ramped up - the effects of the terrible legacy of apartheid dispossession cannot be overstated - but the process will require innovative thinking, tons of hard work, lots of resources and, critically, co-operation of commercial farmers.