Is South Africa - the continent's most advanced nation - going the way of Zimbabwe?
 The outcome of general elections in South Africa between May and August next winter will be determined by the mood of the land on whether property rights enshrined in the 1996 constitution are to be scrapped and white farms seized by blacks as happened in Zimbabwe in the 1980s.
The electoral contest will be between the sitting president Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, of the African National Congress (ANC); Mmusi Aloysias Maimane, leader of the moderate Democratic Alliance and the radical Julius Sello Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Mr Malema champions white farm land seizures, and while his popular support is still slight, it has nearly doubled among the impoverised majority. The moderate Mr Maimane, who is expected to increase his second place support, just as President Ramaphosa is expected to win, may well make the growing EFF and its leader, Mr Malema, the king the vote is close. And that support will likely be traded for white land seizures, or “land reform” as it is referred to in polite company.
The worldwide reaction to Mr Malema's land seizure scheme prompted Mr Ramaphosa to withdrawn the bill to amend the constitution to abrogate property rights, despite the general expectation that it would probably squeak through with a bare two-thirds majority needed for constitutional change.
It is well to remember that the ANC, was once the Communist Party in all but name, so land seizures are part of its political DNA deep down. Only Mr Maimane and his liberal centrist Democratic Alliance stands against land seizures in principle.
Since the end of white rule in 1994, the ANC has followed a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model whereby the government buys white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks. But progress has been slow.
The ANC has taken steps toward, changing the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation after more than two decades after apartheid’s demise in 1994. That is, it has adopted a resolution to redistribute land to blacks without compensation to white owners with majority parliamentary support.
Based on a survey of title deeds, the government says blacks own four per cent of private land, and only eight per cent of farmland has been transferred to black hands, well short of a target of 30 per cent that was meant to have been reached in 2014.
AgriSA, a farm industry group, says 27 per cent of farmland is in black hands. Its figure includes state land and plots tilled by black subsistence farmers in the old homelands.
Ben Cousins, a professor in Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, has noted there are no estimates on private transactions involving black farmers who have purchased land themselves, so the data is incomplete.
There has been a parallel process of “land claims” by individuals or communities dispossessed under white rule, but most of the settlements have involved cash paid by the state instead of people reoccupying their land, and 87 per cent of the claims have been urban.
The 17 million people who reside in the former homelands, a third of the population, are mostly subsistence farmers working tiny plots and subject to customary law, that is unofficial law, based on customs of a particular place.
Critics of ANC land policy say that instead of seizing farmland from whites, such households should be given title deeds, turning millions into property owners.
But David Masondo, of the ANC’s Economic Transformation Committee, has said such ideas face resistance from traditional leaders, a key ANC political base cultivated by former president Jacob Zuma, formerly leader of the South African Communist Party. These supporters are hostile to private property ownership in principle.
Today, South Africa is rife with racial tensions, and there is a popular leftist view that the redistribution of land would heal the wounds of racist colonial rule.
But sceptical whites, who own most of the land, look back on the land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe, the former white-run Rhodesia, where white farms were taken over by black gunmen, and then seized by the government.
Zimbabwe's tobacco sector is the largest grower of tobacco in Africa, and sixth largest in the world. Tobacco is Zimbabwe's leading agricultural export with 54 per cent sold to China.
Since white Zimbabwean farms have been seized, production of tobacco has been disrupted, and the harvest fell by 79 per cent between 2000 and 2008, and white farmers in South Africa expect similar outcomes to those experienced in Zimbabwe.
Whites are 8.4 per cent of the South African population, but by some measure, own 23.6 per cent of the land while blacks own 1.2 per cent. Most of corporate land is run by white executives, putting the white-owned total at 73 per cent.
White suspicions are aroused by the words of mean-spirited Mr Malema, of the EFF, who clearly had revenge in mind, when he said the lack of compensation was needed to “teach whites a lesson”.
Then EFF national spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said white farmers “have taken the land through a violent crime against humanity”.
Acts of violence have been carried out against white farmers for years, which many around the world have cited as “white genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”.
But President Ramaphosa insists such crimes are part of a wider social problem and not a racially motivated. The country's national murder rate is currently 34.1 per 100,000 citizens, according to the South African Police Service.
But whites disagree with Mr Ramaphosa. AfriForum, for one, claimed there were 90 recorded attacks on white homesteaders in the first three months of 2018 alone, a rate of one every five days.
It’s worth noting this is extremely high compared with police figures, which report 47 murders and 638 attacks on farm owners in 2016/17. That compares with a high of 140 killings and 1,069 attacks in 2001-02.
“What is happening to us is torture, it is slaughter, it is brutal, it is revenge. The world doesn’t know what is happening in South Africa,” said Gabriel Stols, whose younger brother Kyle was gunned down by assailants.
There is fear that as agriculture is the backbone of the economy, the undermining of property rights will shatter investor confidence. But President Ramaphosa said the policy will be undertaken in a way that does not threaten food security or economic growth.
Still, the risks are substantial. South Africa feeds itself and is the continent’s largest maize producer and the world’s second-biggest exporter of citrus fruits.
Agriculture accounts for less than three per cent of national output but employs around 850,000 people accounting for five per cent of the workforce. Threats to production would also fan food inflation, hurting the poor.
Wandile Sihlobo, an economist with the Agricultural Business Chamber, says the farm loan book is ZAR160 billion (US$14 billion), and farmers could not repay loans there would be ripple effects across the economy.
While the world must await next winter's elections for a clearer picture to what will unfold in what is still Africa's most successful economy, there are growing fears that if Africa's best case scenario becomes tragic what will be become of the far less stable sub-Saharan region as a whole. Things don't look good.
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