After President Trump tweeted about the mistreatment of white farmers in South Africa, the media rushed out stories justifying the ANC regime’s plans to ethnically cleanse white farmers by seizing land without compensation. These stories invariably contained a popular fake statistic abused by racists.
Bloomberg pretended to conduct a fact check by accusing Trump of misleading the public and claimed that, a “land audit released in February showed that whites own 72 percent of the land.”
“Land reform is a highly divisive issue in South Africa, where white residents, who make up 8 percent of the population, own 72 percent of land, according to official figures,” the New York Times observed.
“Whites own 72 percent of the 37 million hectares held by individuals,” the Washington Post contended.
The hedging isn’t hard to spot.
Is it 72% of the land or 72% of the land owned by individuals? There’s a huge difference. A sizable amount of South Africa’s land is actually owned by the government. That is, it’s owned by the ANC. Quite a lot of it is held by assorted organizations, including the tribal authorities of black South Africans.
For example, the Ingonyama Trust, controlled by the Zulu king, has 3 million hectares of land. The ANC’s decision to seize the king’s land has made fewer headlines, but has been even more explosive.
The Washington Post’s claim that “whites own 72 percent of the 37 million hectares held by individuals” has to be placed within the context of the 93 million acres of arable agricultural land in South Africa.
Even if the claim were true, that would amount to white farmers owning 27% of the agricultural land.
There’s a big difference between 27% and 72%.
But the land audit wasn’t addressing agricultural land. So even that claim isn’t true and doesn’t hold up.
The 2017 land audit stated that only 33% of the land in South Africa is owned by individuals. One report on the survey claimed that white South Africans own 23.6% of rural land.
The land audit is nevertheless the source of the 72% claim even though it doesn’t really address farmland. The South African Institute of Race Relations called the land audit a “deeply questionable” source. The media would not normally take statistics from a government intent on seizing land from farmers as absolutely reliable. That it chose to not only do so, in this case, is due to its political bias.
The media plucked a misleading statistic from a dubious report by a corrupt government bent on ethnic cleansing land seizures, and then somehow made it worse by removing most of the context.
The idea that 32,000 white commercial farmers control most of the land in South Africa is bizarre nonsense. And the media’s decision to imply that this is so, while misrepresenting the statistics, is a typical example of fake news. Worse still, it’s fake news in the service of racism and ethnic cleansing.
The media claims to love fact checking.
Africa Check, a fact checking site whose partners include AFP and reliable lefty backers like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, rated a similar claim that whites own 80% of South Africa as incorrect.
“According to Mmuso Riba, the Chief Surveyor-General, ‘there is no basis’ for the claim that whites own 80% of South Africa”, it noted.
Land area is also not a very useful metric, because much of South Africa’s land is semi-desert. In KwaZulu-Natal, 73.5% of agricultural land is owned by the government and “previously disadvantaged individuals”; in the Eastern Cape, it’s 48.3%; in Limpopo, it’s 52%; in the North West, it’s 45.3%.
And these are the areas with some of South Africa’s most fertile land. One measure claimed that South Africa’s black population already owns 48% of the agricultural potential. Much of South Africa’s land is entangled in a complicated system of government managed or collective forms of land ownership.
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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