President Jacob Zuma advised traditional leaders yesterday to lodge land claims collectively, recommending that there should be one legal firm to lodge claims on behalf of communities. Addressing the National House of Traditional Leaders in Pretoria, Zuma said communities that could not afford steep legal fees and were unable to argue their case properly ran the risk of losing their claims."You cannot make [land] claims piecemeal as land was taken away. That is why I recommend that we should have one firm that will deal with all of them," he said.Zuma said the land issue was a national issue."One traditional leader may not have enough to pay expensive lawyers and you might lose the land when you are not supposed to, but when the matter is collectively tackled then you might succeed," he said.The president said the land issue would always be a problem until it was properly dealt with, saying the question was how it should be approached."The question I was asking is: Can we resolve the problem with the kind of land distribution in the country as it stands when we took the decision of a cut-off date," Zuma said.The president lamented that the confiscation of land had made Africans poor, saying it was "brutally unfair" to say the land was only taken in 1913, but added that he did not want to talk too much lest he be "accused of burning down the country when I am not burning, but talking the truth"...