When Lungisile Ntsebeza talks about the power of education, he speaks from his position as a university professor and also from his more than two decades as a community volunteer in South Africa.
Ntsebeza, an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town, also is deputy chairman of the board of the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE). That non-governmental organization (NGO) is based in Cape Town but has eight affiliates in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces.
“TCOE is committed to improving the lives of poor people,” Ntsebeza said.
“Our mission is to empower people through educational workshops that give them knowledge about how our new government operates. Above all else, we give people a sense of how to open doors to local government.”
Since 2000, the Mott Foundation has provided $570,000 in grants to support TCOE’s goal of increasing and strengthening rural residents’ involvement with local government.
TCOE and its affiliates train community leaders on government policies, encouraging participation in planning processes at the local level, monitoring implementation of development plans, and assessing the impact of local government services on their communities.
Since the nation’s first non-racial, democratic elections in 1994, TCOE-sponsored workshops -- and those offered by its affiliates -- have taught rural residents how to run for elected offices, and how to access public funds for owning land, improving roads, and providing electricity and clean water for their villages.
For Ntsebeza, guiding people through the political and legal maze that leads to land ownership is an important component of the affiliates’ work because it improves many families’ standard of living.
“When farm land becomes available, people often work cooperatively instead of competitively. It’s that same spirit that made communal gardens so successful,” he said.
Ntsebeza, considered an expert on the subject of land reform, has written several publications, including Democracy compromised: Chiefs and the politics of land in South Africa.
In 2001, 60 residents of Luphaphasi in the Eastern Cape province worked with TCOE’s affiliate, CALUSA, to acquire the region’s first cooperative farm. All 60 original co-op members still farm the 2,000 hectares (approximately 4,900 acres).
However, black co-ops are the exception because land transfers from the white minority to the black majority have been slow in coming. Government records show that 90 percent of South Africa’s commercial farm land remains in the hands of whites, even though the bulk of property was black Africans’ ancestral land before colonial rule and apartheid.
While the government has set a goal of transferring 30 percent of the nation’s farmland from white ownership to black by 2014, only 4 percent actually has been transferred.
For Ntsebeza, and staff at TCOE and its affiliates, there remain several high priority issues directly linked with farm land reform, including an urgent need to upgrade roads. Country roads, often in an “appalling state” during ideal weather conditions, become inaccessible on rainy days, he said.
“When the poor get access to land, they can make a living raising animals or growing produce, but they need good roads to get that produce to the market. TCOE and its affiliates are achieving some successes, but sometimes these seem almost invisible because South Africa’s poor face many other problems.”