h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How do you folks feel about this? There's a lot of talk about this these days, even from President Cyril Ramaphosa. Land reform has, according to the folks pushing this agenda, failed to transfer enough land and property from white folks to blacks, so now they want to be more aggressive, simply taking farms and other properties from white people, and not compensating whoever they're taking from. They also talk of using force, even violence. At the same time, white folks are saying they will use force to protect what's theirs. This is not a good situation for the country ...

No, indeed, it isn't.

Do you have a judiciary that could put a brake on what sounds like a volatile move?

Hi Dmitri! Well the government will have the courts in its pockets mostly … if they want to do it, they will find a way. And there's already a thing going on where white farmers are being murdered … there's a lot of controversy around that, but there have been allegations of the police and government being involved in the attacks, tortures, rapes and murders, which could function as a way to not only get rid of the whites directly murdered, but to scare other white farm owners, perhaps to leave their land for safer places.

This is terrible. And ultimately bad for everyone - not only in terms of public safety, but in terms of food supply, I would think.

They did this kind of thing in our neighbor country of Zimbabwe, maybe you've heard. Ended up destroying the entire economy, penniless and starving Zimbabweans streamed into South Africa. I once met a couple of guys, they've been hiking for five days straight and when I encountered them still had about 400 km to go to reach Pretoria, their destination. But indeed, the farm-grabs in Zim heralded great suffering for the population. The farms didn't go to people who actually could and wanted to farm, they went to politicians in power and their cronies.

Be that as it may … we do need land and economical reforms over here, we do need more equality, but that's not the way.