Image: Corruption Watch
The fifth and final episode of our new podcast series series on land corruption, titled Land and Corruption: Story of the Marginalised, is now available.
The series marks our work in the second phase of Transparency International’s (TI) Land and Corruption in Africa project, where our focus area was land in the agricultural sector. We are part of an eight-chapter team – with Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – that successfully completed the first phase from 2014 to 2019. Overall, the LCA project seeks to address land corruption risks and injustices in sub-Saharan Africa.
In previous podcast episodes we established how poor and marginalised communities have received a raw deal in their quest for inclusion and equality in the land equity dynamic since the dawn of democracy.
Episodes 1 and 2, respectively, laid down the background to the LCA2 project and discussed land issues in the agricultural sector. Episodes 3 and 4, meanwhile, exposed the intersection between corruption and human rights abuses in this space, and exposed the broken promises of wealthy and powerful white farmers who used their workers to score funding from the government, respectively.
Now, episode 5 explores how policies introduced along with the new democratic order could inadvertently be responsible for the continued suffering of labour tenants and other social groups trying to access and own land. This despite the constitutional safeguards put in place to mitigate the very hardships that are now experienced by the rural poor. Experts discuss the problems at hand, and some of the solutions that have been put in place.
Our research in this project included on-the-ground work in the Western Cape. We focused on the living conditions of farm workers, in particular the beneficiaries of farm worker equity schemes, and how they are consistently denied what is due to them as shareholders.
For the full story, listen to episode 5 of Land and Corruption: Story of the Marginalised now.
NOTE:
This podcast series is made possible by funding received from Transparency International. For more on CW’s work, including research reports and toolkits on land corruption, please visit our website at www.corruptionwatch.org.za. Our e-mail address is info@corruptionwatch.org.za. You can call us on 011 242 3900.
