Africa Check: Do 40,000 whites own 80% of SA? The claim is incorrect.

Author: Anim van Wyk

Land ownership in South Africa remains heavily skewed across racial lines twenty years after the end of Apartheid. But is 80% of the country really in the hands of only 40,000 white families?

It is a claim that has been widely circulated since Andile Mngxitama, a Member of Parliament and “commissar for land and agrarian revolution” with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), raised the issue in an open letter to business tycoon Richard Branson in May this year.

Two weeks ago, South Africa’s Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, Gugile Nkwinti, was quoted making a similar claim. “We have all South Africans living here but some control more than 70% of the land and they actually constitute about 14% of the population in our country.”

Can the claim be dismissed as nonsense, or is there some truth to it?

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