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.