“Training land reform beneficiaries before transfer is impractical” – Minister

Incidences where land distributed to beneficiaries becomes unproductive barely after eighteen months have cast doubt on whether the implementation of the land reform programme is ill-timed. As a result, analysts as well as the mainly white dominated agricultural community have called for the training of potential beneficiaries before the process was expedited, as stipulated in the National Development Plan (NDP).
 However, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti,told parliament that training of beneficiaries prior to transfer was impractical.
“There is a catch here, the catch is can you imagine us starting to train people before we transfer land. It means we would take a number of years training people, training people and then we transfer the land. These things should happen simultaneously and that is how we are approaching it.”