Lease ruling a blow for Ingonyama Trust Board

THE Pietermaritzburg High Court yesterday delivered a landmark ruling on the Ingonyama Trust Board (ITB), ruling that the ITB’S lease agreement with residents of the land who paid rent to the board and trust were unlawful and in violation of the Constitution.

The court said that the ITB had to pay back all the money to the people who had been paying rent as part of the now unlawful lease agreements.

This comes as a blow for the ITB which had been fiercely protected by the late Amazulu King Goodwill Zwelithini Kabhekuzulu, who was the sole trustee of the three million hectares of land in Kwazulu-natal that the board administers.

It is unclear what stance his son and successor King Misuzulu Kazwelithini has on the land as he is yet to make any pronouncements on the land while his ascendancy to the throne is being challenged in the same court.

Since the mid 2000s, the trust has signed lease agreements with residents living on trust land, meaning they had to pay rent with the trust said to amass an annual profit of close to R100 million.

However, in November 2018 the lease agreements were challenged in the Pietermaritzburg High Court in an application instituted by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) of South Africa on behalf of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (Casac) against the Ingonyama Trust, the Ingonyama Trust Board and the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform.

Other applicants in the matter included the Rural Women’s Movement and seven individual holders of informal land rights.

The LRC said yesterday that it was pleased that the court had ruled in its favour following its argument that the conduct of the Ingonyama Trust in inducing rights-holders to enter into such leases was unlawful.

Handing down the judgment, the court ordered that both the Ingonyama Trust and the Ingonyama Trust Board had acted unlawfully.

“All the residential lease agreements concluded by the Trust and the Board, in respect of residential land or arable land or commonage on Trust-held land, are declared to be unlawful and invalid.

“The Trust must refund all monies paid to the Trust or the Board under the lease agreements to the persons who made such payments and any person who made payments under the lease agreement is entitled to a refund by the Trust to the extent of such payments,” the court order declared.

Casac executive secretary Lawson Naidoo said that the judgment provided all of the remedies that they had sought, including declaring the conduct of the Ingonyama Trust to be ruled unlawful and invalid.

“We obviously welcome the ruling and they’ve set aside the leases and ordered the trust to repay all rents that have been paid to the trust in terms of these leases,” Naidoo said.

He added that it was important to note that the court had declared that the residents on customary land were the true and beneficial owners of that land and that the trust, of which the king was the sole trustee, was a mere custodian of the land and had to use the land for the benefit of the residents.

Annette Steyn, DA MP and spokesperson on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, said that for communal land occupants across the country whose security of tenure had always been tenuous due to paternalistic land administration systems, today’s ruling offered hope that they would eventually become owners of their ancestral land.

Attempts to get comment from Ingonyama Trust Board chairperson Judge Jerome Ngwenya and the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development were unsuccessful as they did not respond to phone calls and text messages.