The emotive land question will forever be a political hot potato if land owners remain myopic and sceptical about the state's holistic land redistribution programme.

The emotive land question will forever be a political hot potato if land owners remain myopic and sceptical about the state's holistic land redistribution programme.

The 2005 Johannesburg Land Summit made recommendations for fast-tracking land reform, which the Land Affairs and Agriculture Department adopted. This forum helped to identify glitches and [discussed] measures to expedite land reform.

If the government is to be blamed for the slow pace of land reform, unions such as the TAU and AgriSA must ask themselves what they have done to inspire their members to help.

All they do is inflate prices to dictate the pace and terms of land reform. If allowed to continue, this will trigger anger among poor, landless people and land owners might find themselves in the same situation as white farmers in Zimbabwe. People there became fed-up and President Robert Mugabe was forced to take drastic steps. Whether he acted correctly or not, the point is that slow land reform triggered the situation.

Landless people have waited very patiently and by 2014 they would have endured the wait for just over a century. For successful land reform to take place, white farmers must support it.

Percy Sepaela, Indermark