None. Theo Diaka, thank you for
joining me in the trenches. Oh, what a privilege to be on
your show again. Jeremy, thank you for inviting
me. I think the best place to start
is for my audience who don't know who you are.
What is your background? I'm a farmer.
I farm subtropical fruits and timber in the Limpopo province,
not that far from the Zimbabwean and Mozambican borders.
I've spent a lifetime in organised agriculture from local
level as a chairman of a farmers organisation in our village up
to international level with the World Farmers Organisation.
Currently, I'm chairing the board of Agri All Africa and of
Sai, our network for family farmers in South Africa.
So you have a lot of experience in farming?
I never have enough experience in farming.
You know, farming is not the same from this season to to that
season and there are No 2 farmers in the world who farm
the same. But yes I've I've been farming
since 1997. It's a calling.
And it's a blessing and it's a privilege.
It is great news for me that you now have a baby in the house,
Jeremy. But let me tell you, there's no
greater joy than raising a child on a farm, letting them sit on
your shoulders, introducing them to nature, helping them to
develop that love for for Mother Nature.
So when we talk about farms or a farmer here in South Africa,
what are we talking about? There are three kinds of farms
here, like on the rest of the continent, just in different
mixes. So the vast majority of our
farmers, people who eke out the livelihood from the soils are
smallholder farmers and many of them in the deep rural areas, in
the the communal areas. We have just more than 2 million
of them in South Africa. And they produce for themselves,
for their own consumption and they trade a little in their
local communities. And the linkage to market is
mostly hawkers or direct marketing.
And then you have your small and medium sized enterprises of
which there are about 32,000 typically family farms and they
would produce for the local markets in Johannesburg,
Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, but they would also export.
And never in our lifetime have we had a year in which we were
not a net exporter of food in South Africa.
We've we've always been an exporter.
And, and then we have these mega farmers and corporate farmers.
And lately more and more of them with big companies and even
sometimes multinational companies start to farm.
And when they do so, you know, they don't support the local
bookkeeper in the small town, the local lawyer, the local
distributor or fertiliser or agrochemicals.
So their contribution to the growth of the rural areas and to
counter urbanisation is actually very little, if any.
And we, we, we cannot really compete against these big
companies because in agricultural production, size
matters. The ends our organisation side
which are try to promote and protect the interests of your
typical family farmer and our context.
A family farmer is not big or small, is not rich or poor, is
not white or black, is not a newcomer or well established
farmer. It is a family making a living
from the soil. OK.
So if we talk about farms or farm attacks, for example in
South Africa, we are mostly referring to commercial farming,
is that right? Yes, it is that middle group,
the the farmers who are farming for profit, who are farming to
to produce surpluses and to sell it mostly into cities or export
it. It is those farms where these
where these board assign at the at the gatepost with the the
name of a farm and a family's name on it.
How many are there? More or less. 32,000 of which
more or less 10% of the successful ones are now black
farmers are beneficiaries of land reform or who entered
through their own investment on, on land and equipment.
But the rest, you know, it, it takes more than one generation
to set up a farm. Typically you would have someone
who decide to buy a farm and it's, he spends a lifetime to,
to pay it and to develop it and to get all the equipment
together and yeah, it, it, it, it literally takes a lifetime.
Then his children, because they know the farm and they have the
experience and they don't have the burden of the capital
outlay. Usually they go big and then
it's in the third generation when cousins need to farm
together that they often lose the farm again because they
don't know where it came from. They were not there.
And it's it's not that easy for cousins to share that vision.
Remember, family farmers who rise in is never the end of the
next financial year. It is the next generation or the
generation after that. And you you need to be focused
for more than a lifetime to get there.
So very often you'll find that cousins or the the wives of
cousins, they, they start to quarrel about exactly what needs
to be reinvested on the farm. Where should this farm be
developed? To what?
What will be the the legacy? Yeah.
It's not just something you can do, and it's not just something
you can study for four years even.
It takes almost a lifetime to get right.
It is so. It is so.
And then you know, you, you, you are aiming at moving target all
the time because the preferences of the consumers are changing
all the time. Here in South Africa, we still
produce into three markets too. Elsewhere, like in Europe, there
are only two markets for us. The biggest part of the market
unfortunately is still the poorest part.
Those families with food security are an issue where it's
an issue. We, we, they don't necessarily
know what they will eat tonight. What they will eat will very
much depend on what is affordable and what is close by.
What can I buy in the immediate environment?
And much of it is stash driven. It's only when you break out of
poverty and move into the middle class that the consumer bother
about the mix on the plate. How healthy is it?
How nutritious is it? What's the relationship between
proteins and the the rest they must be meat and vegetables and
starch etcetera. And then the top end of the
market with that consumer want to make a difference with their
buying power in on, on, on biodiversity, on climate change,
on nature conservation. So they want to know how was
this pig treated before it was slaughtered?
What kind of accommodation did it have?
And they want to scan a barcode to see the history of
production, what was sprayed on these fields or on this fruit,
what kind of herbicide or insecticide was used.
And and hence they will pay even more.
But to ensure that nature friendliness was applied in the
production process, now the export market has very strict
regulations on that. It cost a lot, you must invest a
lot to be able to meet all those criteria.
And in this middle group of of farmers, the the family farmers
who are commercial, they still produce into all three these
markets. A topic that always comes up,
which I think we must deal with, is how how it came to be that
the majority of South African farmers are white.
Yeah, Remember, whites came here to farm in, in in the middle
1600's, the Dutch Indian company, they they decided to
set up a halfway station between Europe and the Middle East
because they needed fresh produce for the ships.
The ships would dock here, replenish the the the food and
and sail on. And literally the very first
whites to establish themselves here were the farmers farming
for those ships. And then more and more of them
became independent contractors, having a production contract
with this Dutch East Indian company, which at the time was
the biggest multinational company in the world.
And then they started to expand further and further away from
Cape Town. And then they started to clash
with the authorities. The British also came here and
they were not that friendly towards the the these farmers of
Dutch, German origin, French origin.
And remember when they came here they found the Queen's son who
were under gatherers not farmers.
And as they expanded they met with the Bantu tribes who came
from Central and West Africa. They moved downwards and they
they met more or less with the Eastern Cape E today on the Kai
River and these caches were often violent.
You have two different kinds of societies, two different kinds
of value systems, 2 cultures. And then here in the early 1800s
when the the the British took over again, these farmers
decided not to be under British rule and they moved up north
through the Great Trek. Now up north you had many
different tribal entities. Some of them were very friendly,
like the water Longbow Seleca in the eastern Free State, where
most of the treks stayed over for a while, fixed their waggons
again. But they were vast empty spaces
in between. And because they had guns and
because they had much modern approach to warfare, very often
they were given land as a buffer zone between conflicting tribal
entities. So they are quite a number of
these tracts, these agreements between tribal authorities and
the old fur trackers to settle on specific areas to be a buffer
between the between conflicting tribes.
And then of course came the the first anti colonial war in
Africa, the wars against the British.
The first one was in 1980 and the second one in 1889 to 19.
O2 and gold was found and diamonds were were discovered
and cities developed around that.
Many people were brought in from the deep rural areas to work in
those mines and urbanisation started to happen.
And then came apartheid. Apartheid actually was a scheme
by which it was decided that each tribal entity will live and
stay on their own land. So you add these homelands where
tribal entities could do their own thing and to to live or work
outside those areas, you needed a kind of a permit.
There was also in, in, in, in those times, a lot of money
invested in developing those homelands to develop industry,
but also agriculture. And some of our most successful
commercial black farmers actually come from that era
where they had for generations been farming as families, hence
the successful farmers in the Northwest Province, in the
Eastern Cape, in Kwazulu Natal, in the northern and eastern
parts of Limpopo today. And then came democracy in 1994.
And by that time around 14% of the total land area in South
Africa was these homelands and another more or less 25% was
government owned land such as the enormous parks we have the
Kruger National Park, the Kalahari Hemsworth Park and also
belonged to mines, churches and, and, and these and around 7075%
of of or or 75,000 hectares. That is we, we have 122 million
hectares in in South Africa, of which about 75,000,000 hectares
was in the hands of white farmers.
Now remember half of our country is a semi desert is very dry,
the Kuru, the Kalahari up to the Swatland and and there you can
only farm extensively with sheep here and there you would find
some indigenous cattle. And so, but our high potential
soils is more or less 7% of our total area and that is in the
east. That's also we we had these
homelands Ince to say today for example, but still nearly half
of all the land is in the hands of whites.
You are comparing a hectare of semi desert now with a hectare
of high potential land and that's unfair.
Where I farm in Tenin, you can have a bigger turnover on 10
hectares of land than what you can with 1000 hectares in the
Guru. And one hectare does not equal 1
hectare when you compare east and West.
So most of the land reform happened in the high potential
lands and unfortunately we did not have much success with land
reform. If I say we did not have
success, maybe it is because we used the wrong measurement.
We measured hectares every year in Parliament our government
would report that we have now moved this number of hectares
from white hands to black hands instead of measuring the number
of profitable black farmers they've put on that land.
And now I must also say to you, I, I want to see the white
farmers, you can make a success out of the conditions in which
we expect beneficiaries of land reform to make a success.
Because these guys do not get ownership of the property.
They become tenants on government owned land.
And if you do not have a title deed, you do don't have
collateral. You cannot go to a bank to get a
loan for production purposes. They are all dependent on a
government department to give them grants with which they need
to buy seed, fertiliser, mechanisation, diesel, pay the
electricity and the wages and the bank.
The the, the the government is not a good bank.
Some of our members inside whom we assisted to apply for these
grants in 2019 only got these in February this year.
So what were they supposed to do in the meantime?
They are delivered to failure. And this is also why in
governments own account, 90% of these projects have failed.
It's actually a system that is failing us, but unfortunately we
are picking up the bill for it because it all causes a lot of
tension and it creates 2 new classes of farmers, white
farmers who own their own land and who are under pressure.
And they are successful. They are some of the most
competitive farmers in the world and black farmers who never own
their own land. They are doomed to be tenants
forever. And it's impossible for them to
become competitive. And there's even tension between
them. But I think the first and most
important criteria for the establishment of new entrants
into our profession is that you need to select people who choose
to be farmers, who want to farm. I can tell you in our
organisation inside where we work with all the universities,
the student organisations are all part of our structure and we
pay a lot of attention and and spend a lot of effort to
schools, especially in the rural areas.
Our ambition is not to lure more youngsters into this profession.
Our ambition is to recruit the brightest young minds into this
profession because agriculture has became a very complex
profession. You, you need to be good at
everything. Human resources management,
financial planning and management.
You need to be an agronomist. You need to understand chemistry
and hence to be competitive to to to be able to produce the
preferred product on global markets, on shelves and shops.
You, you need to compete with the best other farmers in the
world. And hence we spend so much of
our time and effort to try to recruit the brightest young
minds to choose agriculture as a career.
Any any other approach will be disastrous and we will only see
it in 10 or 20 years from now. And then a variable that you
didn't include, which of course now is the worldwide talking
point, is the danger of being a farmer.
Yes, unfortunately the the safety on farms is the biggest
issue which youngsters consider when they choose not to be
farmers or which young farmers consider when they choose to
move away from the farms and live in towns.
We, we, we have this phenomenon in South Africa, farm murders,
farm attacks, and it happens literally every week.
On average, we have seen around 70 farm murders per year in the
last 25 years. Of course, some years we have
more than that and some years we have less than that, but on
average it's one in five days and a farm attack more or less
1:00 every second day. Now there are two arguments
about this for us as farmers. Every farmer spend a lot of
money to safeguard the farm and the area.
We have our own farm watches because we live and work far
from towns and police stations. So in our organisation we manage
188 farm watches. We patrol our area, we are able
to close it off. We are, we train them to use
drones and satellite technology. Of course to, to, to respond to
a farm attack is very important, but more important is to prevent
it. So we also have some
intelligence tools which we use. And I believe that managing this
trend downwards over the last 2-3 years is probably because of
that. Now, some people would say would
argue, like our government does, that this is merely an extension
of a general problem we have with runaway murder statistics
and crime statistics. As farmers, we don't believe
that. We maintain that farm attacks,
farm murders, is in a special category, not that we are that
special, but we say farm attacks are different because although
if you measure it by numbers, there are certain sectors of
society who fall victim to murders more often and in
greater numbers than farmers. Such as the gangsters in the
Cape Flats, the gang wars, or in violence against women and
children. If you measure it per one
thousandth of that category of the population, house is still
higher. There's a bigger chance for a
farmer to die in a farm attack than in any other category of
people in South Africa. But more than that, there are
three things which set us apart there.
There's no one who calls for murder on women and children.
There's no one who incite people to murder gangsters or
communities which are plagued by gangsters on the Cape Flats like
you have the scene of killer farmer, killer buer, politicians
threatening to murder us, saying we will murder them and their
wives and their children and their cats and their dogs if
they don't give the land back to us like we have seen with one of
the parliamentarians in South Africa.
Julius Malema. And andeline karma so no one
calls for it. And then when it happens it is
not accompanied by this brutal torture often happening all
night long. They don't drill holes through
the kneecaps of an old age lady before they murder her.
This torture is absolutely gruesome.
There's nothing like that elsewhere.
And then afterwards you do not have this applause on social
media, whether on Facebook or X hundreds of Twitterati saying
they should be more of this. They've deserved it because they
don't belong in Africa. They should go back to Europe
that you don't find in the other murders.
But there is another argument here, Jeremy, which I think up
to now has not received any attention, even after the
debates in the White House where our government also tried to
persuade the Trump administration that for murders
isn't anything special. We, we have a problem with crime
and murder. Why?
Why do we have such a massive problem with criminality and
with killings in South Africa? Why?
Why can't our police get handles on this thing?
And I believe it's because there are no consequences.
I believe because criminals get away with it all the time.
That's why I believe it is because the police is not a
shadow of what it used to be before we saw Qaeda deployment.
And not only were the most senior positions in the police
given to politically well connected people instead of
professional policemen who came through, the ranks also lower
down and it went down up to grassroots level, police station
level. People were appointed not for
their expertise but for the political connections.
And of course that drove out those who were not politically
connected. And hence today we have better
capacity in the private sector, in the private security sector
than we have in the police. But the same happened in the
national prosecuting authority, in the courts, elsewhere in the
legal value chain. This is why we have such a low
number of successful arrests followed by successful
prosecution following by successful judgments against the
criminals. That's why I think it's also
because you know, fish rotten rods from from the head.
You cannot have these mega criminals having looted billions
from state coffers. And we all know how it happened
and we all know why it happened or who it it it were because we
have this Zondu Commission. And that Zondu Commission
spelled out exactly what happened here.
And years later there was not one prosecution in terms of
that. Now, how do we hope to fight
petty crime and from that to start fighting more serious
crime? If the most serious crimes get
off Scott free, simply because there's no consequences, there's
not the political will to act against it.
Our problem is much deeper and it starts at the policy level
and it starts with the the political will.
Speaking of political will, there was an internal protection
system many years ago called the Commandos, which the ANC
disbanded. Is that correct?
Yes, between 2003 and 2006 all these commandos were disbanded.
The benefit of the commandos was it is a civil society who took
part and and it was from our heritage of the border wall
where we had these commandos in every rural district.
So farmers were part of these commandos and instead of just
opening it up and involving more farm workers and involving
communities, other communities than the farmers, they simply
closed it down. But closing that down really
also brought about this situation where we had a total
shutdown of safety and security capacity.
Now look at this from the angle of the farmer.
Typically they would be an incident where somebody attacked
a farm, a farmyard, and the first line of defence is the
farmer and his family themselves.
Next they would call on the radio and the neighbours would
rush to help them. From there, the farm watch would
be mobilised and the police would be contacted.
They are mostly the last to come onto the scene and now you have
some shooting on a farmyard, but it is between private citizens.
If we had a commander or when we had a commander, you were put in
service. In such an incident, even with
the police reserves, which were supposed to replace the
commanders, that was the promise to us.
We are closing down the commanders, but we are expanding
the police reserves. If this would happen and you
would be put in service, you would act like someone in
uniform, you would be protected by the state, you act as an
agent of the state and the disbandment of the commandos.
And then following that, the failure to get this police
reserve system going means that it is private citizen against
private citizen. And only last week we had a case
where a farmer woke up one night, heard something in his
kitchen and when he got there, there was someone there.
Remember, this is in the middle of the night.
There's someone in your house who just broke in and he shot
him. The perpetrator died.
The farmer is in gaol. He is now being charged with
murder. And even if he would be able to
lock him and his family in the bedrooms and waited for the farm
watch when the farm watch got there, until their lives are
threatened, until the perpetrator shoots, there is no
way you can defend yourself both in the situation and in a court
of law. So This is why it is important
for us to have a system, whether it is the reinstatement of the
commando system, whether it is the expansion of the police
reserves, but we need a system where you are being put in
service, where you can act as an agent of the state.
Just for clarity, Theo, when Trump was talking about the farm
attacks, he was speaking specifically about white
farmers. Do black farm workers, of which
they are numerous, also succumb to these farm attacks?
Oh yes, Oh yes, there are many of them.
You know, at Nampu, at our biggest agricultural exhibition,
there's this monument and all the victims names are on the So
it's not only white farmers, it's also black farmers.
One of the most gruesome scenes I've I've seen was the killing
of an Indian farmer. She was pregnant at the time and
she was not just killed, she she was slaughtered in KZN three
about 3-4 years ago. And then of course there are the
guests of farmers, farm managers and farm workers who were also
killed. But the vast majority are white
farmers. Do you think there's an agenda
against it? I mean, I'm, I'm referring to
Trump now he, he refers to it as a white genocide.
That's a very emotive term. But is there a targeted attack
against white Afrikaner farmers, do you think?
Well, I think 1 would be very naive to say there is not,
because why would people sing Kill a farmer, kill a Boer?
Yeah, and just to be. Clear just to be.
Clear, just to be clear that that song has been protected by
the government and the highest court in the land and you and
it's not sung by a handful of people either.
It's sung by a large percentage of the country and it and it's
and it's very specific. Kill the Boer is a white farmer.
Yeah, yeah, This is this is one of the saddest parts of our
recent history, that the courts would not condemn the song as
hate speech. And then even the highest court,
the Constitutional Court, they did not hear us.
They decided to close the doors of justice to us before they
heard our our case. So we have now depleted all our
local remedies and we must now take this to the international
stage and seek justice elsewhere in the world to have this song
be declared hate speech. But you know, around 3103
thousand 200 farmers have been killed over the last 30 years.
And as I said, it's not only white farmers, given that we
only have about 32,000 for commercial farmers in that
middle bracket. The fact is that we all know
someone who have been murdered on a farm and they are way too
many families who have felt it because one of their own have
been killed. So for us, of course it's
emotional and of course we feel under threat.
Whether this is a genocide or not will depend on how you
define a genocide. My organisation PSI is also the
biggest voice of Zimbabwean farmers and we are wrestling
with the Zimbabwean government for compensation on on on land
reform. But it's not only with the white
farmers who lost their land since 2000, it's also the
Matabili farmers who lost their land in the middle 1980s.
They were four hundred, 640 of them whose land was taken and
the cattle. Now that was a genocide.
The Guguruyundi, that was a genocide where about 20, more
than 20,000 people were slaughtered by the North Korean
5th Brigade. We have seen what the massacre
is, what the genocide is in Rwanda, where more than a
million people were killed. The Americans and specifically
the Trump administration and many NGOs with whom we have
close contacts lately, they say no.
A genocide is not only the killing, it's this whole
process. It is the run up to the
slaughtering of people too. It is the classification of
people. It is name calling.
It is typically songs like Kill the Farmer, kill the Boer that
leads to that. And you don't need to wait for
the blood to flow down the streets before you call it out.
And in our liaison with the second Trump Trump
administration, this is the argument too.
It should not happen. Your country should not allow.
This kind of hate speech. And because of that we will turn
on the pressure on them. So as farmers, we feel there's
absolutely no justification for singing songs like that.
There's also no justification for politicians in the MK party
who say let's go and kill the farmers and kill their wives and
kill their children and even kill their cats and dogs and not
being arrested, not being tried for it and not to be in gaol
time for it. There is no excuse for that.
And This is why the pressure on the South African government,
especially from the Trump administration, is welcomed by
us. Certainly in no modern civilised
society can this be deemed to be normal and acceptable.
What is the severity of some of these attacks?
Well, the as I said, the torture is is gruesome.
When I was president of the Limpopo Farmers Organisation,
Provincial Farmers Structure Agri Limpopo, I did not miss the
opportunity to go to the scenes to visit the families.
But it's something that never leaves you.
Jeremy, let me tell you that smell of the blood on the floors
and the walls, things that lay around broken.
You can see there's been a struggle and in the, the way of
killing the, the torturing, burning them with, with irons
and stuff it, it never leaves you, you, you cannot Unsee it
afterwards, ever. I, I now think of this incident
with Brendan Horner, the, the, the young farm manager who was
killed three years ago in the Eastern Free State ballroom.
And, and you might remember the big Pharma gatherings in Senegal
where the EFF also turned up and, and they had the audacity
to stand in front of the the courtroom and, and sing Killer
farmer killer Buddha right there in the street too.
And remember, those perpetrators have never been found.
There was no consequences up to today.
And the farmers and the police do not trust each other.
Yet the farmers believe that it's got everything to do with
the with stock theft and that the police are part of these
stock theft syndicates. Hence they demanded that the the
management of the police be changed.
The command system should be changed in that area.
Now, that's very close to the city, and it is so that the
hotspot of stock theft is on that list to border, simply
because it's so easy to take livestock across that border.
And then you can no longer track or or or or or trace the
perpetrators. There is not a farmer I know who
does not have a contingency plan, who has not practise this.
I mean, we had exercises with, with, with their families to say
should something happen, this is how we will act.
Know exactly where the arms and ammunition is, know exactly what
to lock, where and where to go, how to make sure that the women
and the children are safe. Getting to the radio, having
panic buttons all over and then you have your first, your
second, your third and your 4th domain where first you safeguard
the bedrooms, then the house, then the yard, then the farm and
then from there it goes to the community structures.
The the farm watches safeguard the road, the value, closing it
down, making sure that the rest would be safe too.
And that is daily life. Farmers are not part of that
kind of structure. They they, they are very
vulnerable. The government also stopped
collecting data on this, didn't it?
Yes, we've been wrestling the government on farm attack data
for the last few years. I, I remember the first meeting
I attended as a representative of a district agricultural union
was in 2003 when we had this meeting with the local police
commander and we quarrelled about the, the, the, the data.
What does a farm attack and what does not, what qualifies and
whatnot Is a farm attack one only if you have a mass number,
if you have a reported it to the police station and then got
registration number for it. Because me, myself, I have very,
very often gone to a police station to report a crime.
And then you never get this number because they need to
report that there is a downswing on, on crime and their bonuses
depend on that. So the more numbers they give
out, the, the, the less the chances that they would get
recognition for having managed the crime statistics down.
And is a, an attack on a, a very urban plot of eight hectares or
12 hectares? Is that the farm attack?
We say yes, it is. Much of our vegetables around
cities are grown in these very urban areas.
The the smaller farms, the small holdings.
Is an attack on a communal farmer, a farm attack?
We say it is. We count them all on our
statistics and then twice a year we sit with the police and we
campaign notes and then they might be information which we
did not have Privy to. Sometimes they convince us that
the certain incident was not a farm attack, but more often we
convince them that the data is incomplete and that they have
missed a few of these incidents. Do you think, do you think a lot
of this is random because that's what the media would say, or
would you say that the minority of these attacks are random?
It's well planned. You don't just walk past the
farm 10 kilometres from the next farm and then decide, well,
let's quickly attack this farm. No, it's well planned, well
executed. Very often you, you can
afterwards find places where the perpetrators have stayed for a
while, watching the farmyard, seeing what the routines are,
when will will, will will people be leaving the farm and when
will the farmer get back means so often it happens when you get
back from church on a Sunday mornings, either at the farm
gate or the gate of the farmyard and, and you know the, the, the
equipment used to jam, for example, any signals of radios
or or of mobile phones, the arms used.
Very often we as as as as organised farmers, we show to
the police that they must be either serving or ex military
personnel be involved here. Look how many arms are lost,
weapons are lost by the police. It's like thousands.
And where do they go? They find their way into the
hands of inter alien farm attackers.
Where would anybody get automatic rifles from?
Or this signal jamming equipment?
Where would they get it from? Why do you think white farmers
are so hated? Well, I'm not sure that they are
really so hated. There is political power behind
mobilising certain sectors of society and I think by
mobilising the uneducated and the poorest in deep rural areas,
saying while you are poor in these areas, there are other
people who also live in these areas who are wealthy, like the
farmers. They drive cars, they give jobs,
they own land. It's because you don't own land
and we will take the land from them and give it to you.
And This is why you will see that the the voter base of these
radical political parties, it's always the deep rural areas.
The moment you you have a middle class, the moment you see a
class of people who now have to pay a house, a car, school fees
at the end of every month, they no longer vote for those parties
and they're not excited about taking people's stuff without
paying them. They, they choose against
expropriation without compensation.
So they need to fuel on that date.
But we do not see it in our farmers meetings and we don't
see it in, in, in, in, in other public spaces.
We don't see it in the workplace.
We don't see it on the market. We only see it really at these
political rallies and of course then when the attacks happened,
I can remind you of this guy who in court when he was asked but
why so brutally torture your victims before killing them, He
said because of killer, farmer, killer boy, I was taught to hate
them. You know, there are these
incidences where absolutely nothing is stolen, but then
there are also those where they spend the whole night to steal
just about everything they can load onto a track, a truck or a
Bucky and all the farmers vehicles.
What what bothers us are actually those where nothing is
stolen at all. So it was just the farm attack
for the sake of a farm attack. And that is proved to us that
there's something more than just an extension of general problem
with crime we have. Sometimes they're right on the
wall with the blood of the of the dead farmers.
The right killer farmer, killer boy.
Yeah, I've, I've seen some scenes like that.
So yeah, why do you think the media is so dismissive of this?
Well, it's especially the English media who for many years
never reported on farm attacks. The world did not believe that
we have this phenomenon because the English media did not report
it and the Afrikaans media is not read elsewhere in the world.
If, if there is one institution who really failed us when it
comes to, to farm attacks, it is mainstream media, especially the
English media. And I had a few opportunities at
conferences sitting on panels. We, I confronted them with this.
But you know, they say it competes with other news.
It, it, it is a surprise when in KZN, a very popular couple is
brutally murdered and all of a sudden thousands and thousands
of farmers pitch up and they put crosses all along the road and
they they drive down that road to the farm.
Or when it happens in in Cape Town, outside of Stellenbosch.
And then people ask, where does it come from now?
But it's because it's been an issue.
The world just did not know about it.
Yeah. This is why one of the things
for which we are forever grateful for the second Trump
administration is, is revealing of mainstream media for what it
is. Not news reporters, but
narrative creators. And I think farmers fell victim
to this false narrative creating by mainstream media in South
Africa. Now as a South African I also
know the answer to this question but I have a failing to national
audience Theo and the question that often gets thrown at me is
so why do you stay? Because I was made of this soil.
I'm not the Euro African, I'm Afro African.
My family has been here since 1676 and if the last straw burns
down in this country, I hope to be there to try to put out the
fire. I'm not going anywhere.
I'm going to put up a fight to normalise this country again.
And a vast majority of farmers will tell you exactly that.
You know, farmers have deep roots because we make our living
from the soils. And it's not just deep roots
here, it's in a particular place because you're not the farmer in
general who happens to find pineapples, who far to farm
avocados. You want to farm avocados, you
go to the Limpopo and Pumalanga Low felt.
You want to farm pineapples, you go to the Hampthurs Valley or
the North Coast of KZ18. You're a farmer from a
particular area, farming a particular commodity.
That's who you are. You cannot be that elsewhere.
So we have deep roots. We are very flat rocks.
We we are not moved that easily and that is why our aspiration
is to get this country normalised again and to get it
competitive again, to build our economy again and we love the
people of this country. Contrary to what the media tried
to portray us, we live in harmony with the communities
around us. And we we've done it for the
last 360 years. If it was true that there's this
conflict, these racial conflict, we would have seen it all over.
It would not be small gangs. It would, it would have spilled
over into the streets. You, you would have seen it in
the workplace. You would have seen it on the
market floor. You would have seen it in the
small towns and it's not there. There is political power in
fueling on that narrative and it is masterly done by these racist
activists. And remember, we have them on
both sides. Unfortunately, we'll find racism
amongst whites too, where there are even some farmers.
But that is a very, very small minority.
Like when it came to the vote, these radical groups, the EFF
got less than 10% of the vote and look where they got it from.
And they build out the public image because they are no
consequence for them to fuel it on.
They, they look like they are above the law because no one
would touch them. That's the real danger.
If we we don't need new laws to manage this.
We must just apply the law equally.
They must be equality before the law.
Then I think this can be manageable.
We, we, we, we have even seen it there in Limpopo when one of
these political parties decided to March on a very big farm.
A few farmers, not that farm, but a few nearby farmers, They
have put up a little kiosk on the road to this big farm saying
that you're going for a T shirt and a meal.
Look what we can offer you. You get 2 T shirts and a lot of
meat. Yeah.
And the buses did not get to that farm.
So yeah, the very, very often you have rent the crowd even
this. Video clips which was played in
the White House with 90,000 supporters of a political party.
You know how many of them was paid to get there?
And you heard it in the aftermath when some of the party
officials were fired because they could not get enough people
to fill a bus, even if they had the money to pay them.
So no, I I'm concerned about the image that there's a kind of a
brewing racial war in South Africa.
It is not. And just adding to that, the
relationship between the farmers and the farm workers is
generally good. You know, just like farmers come
for generations, farm workers very often also come for
generations. You live in the same yard, you
know each other very well, The children go to school together.
If my wife is sick today, all the workers know it.
And if their wives are sick today, I I will know it because
it's my problem too. We make our living from the same
soils. That's why very often they are
murdered too. They are very often also in the
first or second line of defence when there's a farm attack that
farm workers that they are paid less than workers in cities that
is so that is so all over the world you will find that the
minimum wage is lower than for example, in a factory.
But then they also live off the farm.
They live there, they have the food right there from the farm.
They expendable income is often higher because what they need is
right there on the farm and it's, you know, open labour
market. If people are not treated well,
nothing stops them to pack their bags and go to a next farm.
And let me tell you, as a farmer and an employer myself, the
competition is on for good farm workers.
I and sick and tired of training young farm workers and just when
they mastered sorry the skills to drive this new machine or to
graft the trees, another farmer would pay them a little more and
save on all the expenses of of doing the training.
There's a big competition for good farm workers and, and you
know, the the technology on farms lately he's up such that
you no longer just go onto the street and recruit somebody to
work on your farm. You need highly skilled people
these days, young people who are strong enough and smart enough
to master their technology. You don't spend 10 million Rand
on a piece of equipment and then underpay the operator who can
cause a lot of damage. So this idea that racial tension
is being fueled because of poor relations between farmers and
farm workers, that they are incidents.
It is so that we suffer from those incidents because that is
what you'll read on the front pages of newspapers.
That is so. But it is absolutely isolated
and very few and far apart. Do you have any closing
thoughts? Yes, the there are two ways in
which the problem we have discussed can be solved, from
the top down or from the bottom up.
And this week that's passed, I have spent quite some time with
the Black farmers in the in my province, in the Limpopo
province, discussing similar issues, discussing the
frustration with government, with inefficiencies and that
kind of stuff. I came back and I thought by
myself, you know, I'm the wrong person to convey this message to
government. Actually we need strong Black
farmers, leaders who can do it, but they won't because they fear
intimidation. They fear that they will be
dropped to the back of the line when tractors and fertiliser
will be dished out by government again.
And they they want me to do it. I'm not vulnerable to that
because I'm not eligible for seed and fertilisers or
mechanisation. We are doing everything we can
from bottom up. Our problem here is the top down
part. Our problem is the political
will. What we expect from our
government, and specifically from President Ramaphosa, is to
say no more singing killer farmer, kill the Boer.
That's nonsense. I distance myself from it.
We need him to say that. We need him to take the lead.
We need him to say that whenever this kind of thing happens, they
will meet the full force of the law and then we need recognition
that we have a problem with with without, that we will not solve
it. Only when they recognise that
there's a problem with rural safety, then they can act, set
up committees, set up multi departmental structures to
coordinate both between state capacity and private capacity to
see how we can solve it. And then we need to rethink the
potential of agriculture to create wealth.
The way we are going about it, highly politicised land issues,
very suspicious selection of the the beneficiaries of land
reform. It's not going to help us.
It will not create that clause of profitable black farmers.
How can I follow you and your work?
I'm on the wrong side of 60 so I do not have the fingers for
small buttons which I I need in the modern age.
But I'm on Twitter, COD, Yahoo on XI, enjoy X very much because
it's short and condensed. I'm on Facebook under my own
page and I've created an another page because what is limited by
the number of followers. And in my organisation, PSI, we
have a YouTube channel and we found that it is much easier to
communicate with the the younger generation of farmers through
short video clips than by writing them emails or letters.
And it is an open YouTube channel.
Just go to sai.org. Theodore Yorja, God bless you.
Thank you for joining me in the trenches.
Thank you Jeremy for inviting me again and for allowing me to
share your platform. Thank you for what you are doing
for us, the farmers.