Emerging and small-scale Kouga farmers are fed up with the council’s failure to give them access to a commonage for their cattle to graze on.
In a closed meeting with the Kouga municipal manager and other municipal staff, the farmers said the municipality was not taking them seriously and seemed fine with black farmers losing their livestock due to the exorbitant amounts they had to fork out when their animals were impounded.
The farmers, supported by the Khanyisa Education and Development Trust, said they were tired of not being taken seriously.
Several said they had to spend thousands of rands to release their cattle from the pound in Loerie.
One, who did not give his name, said they did not want to hear “stories” from municipal manager, Charl du Plessis.
“You keep telling us you don’t have land, but you have no problem impounding our livestock and expecting us to pay,” he said.
“Cows, pigs, goats live among us in the township. Where is the land?”
Simphiwe Dada from Khanyisa accused the municipality of giving preference to white commercial farmers and giving them commonage land.
In a letter to the municipality, he wrote: “We find it highly unethical and thus highly problematic that rich people are favoured in the context of many.
“The favouring of white commercial farmers entrenches white privilege and promotes land inequality and deepening black poverty among the poor.”
Bettie Trongo, 66, from Thornhill said because she did not have land, she had to constantly pay to have her cows released from the pound.
Trongo said she used to have 30 cows but now had just six because at times she could not afford the high fees at the pound.“I get a grant, I farm full-time and I support six people with the money and if I had means, I’d buy land myself but I can’t.”
Cattle and pig farmer Eric Mame forfeited six cows in 2017 because he did not have the money to release them.
“The municipality must take us seriously and give us land so our cattle can graze freely and be safe. There’s a lot of land here available even though they deny this,” Mame said.
Colbert Mzamane from Jeffrey’s Bay said when his cows were impounded in September 2017 it had put a financial and emotional strain on his family.
“I had to use money I had saved up for my children’s school to pay the pound,” Mzamane said.
Thembile Mabaso from KwaNomzamo township in Humansdorp said: “We used to pay about R100 per cow or goat, but now they are using privately owned impounds. This thing is killing us and putting us out of business.”
Mabaso said the municipality had its own holding cells but he did not know why it had stopped using them.
“We told them we would rebuild the pounds ourselves so that we can pay less and we were told they would get back to us but they haven’t.”
Benzile Thomas said he had had to pay R4,500 for five cattle at Loerie after they had been taken on the side of the road.
“I’ve been farming for three years and this has been an ongoing problem for us.
“I’ve already forfeited one cow because the people at the Loerie pound demanded R3,000 for it last year.
“When we’re unable to raise the funds to get our cattle back, they sell them at auctions and make money off our animals.”
During the meeting with the farmers, Du Plessis said there was no farmland in Jeffrey’s Bay and the only land available was in Humansdorp, Hankey and Patensie.
Du Plessis also said agriculture was not a municipal competency but rather that of the provincial and national departments of agriculture.
“This explains why there is nothing budgeted for agriculture in the municipal budget.
“To do so would be illegal. We can only perform functions that have been allocated to the municipality.
“Our municipality may not spend money on agriculture.”
Du Plessis said officials did not have a register of how much municipal land there was because the information was not ready yet.
“You must understand this municipality was not one municipality.
“This was combined in 2000 with a lot of other municipality’s information.
“Hankey and Patensie were their own municipalities, Humansdorp its own and the same for Jeffrey’s Bay.
“In this amalgamation of all these municipalities, there are still legacies of that and one of those legacies is that we do not have a single register of all our properties.
“And that is one of the reasons the municipality commissioned an asset register of land so we can do something about this.
“The municipality has identified land suitable for farming, such as Papiesfontein, but that land belongs to the department of public works,” he said.