HANNES BOOYENS, clad in the khaki shorts and shirt of the Afrikaner farmer, shows off tidy rows of trees hanging heavy with grapefruits, soon to be plucked for export. Hezekiel Nkosi, the chairman of the Moletele Communal Property Association, which owns the land and employs Mr Booyens, nods approvingly. “We are happy,” Mr Nkosi says. “We need the best technology, the best farm managers. Otherwise this is a fruitless operation.”

The Moletele people were forced from this land, a picturesque corner of South Africa’s Limpopo province, mainly in the 1950s and 60s. They got back 7,000 hectares of citrus and mango farms in 2007 after a legal claim but struggled to run them. One of the farms collapsed. Moletele leaders went looking for help. The Vumelana Advisory Fund, a non-profit that helps land reform projects, appointed advisers to develop a commercial partnership. The Moletele community now has access to capital and expertise. Young people are being trained so they can run the farms in future. “The best way was to partner with those that have the skills,” Mr Nkosi says.

Under colonial rule and then apartheid, black South Africans were systematically pushed off the land. Whites still own much of it. Righting this historical injustice has been a creakingly slow process over 24 years of democracy. The government promised to transfer 30% of white-owned farmland to blacks by 1999; most estimates reckon it has only transferred 10%. This dawdling pace, combined with a stagnant economy and rising unemployment (it recently hit 37%), provides fertile ground for populist politicians. Loudest has been the Economic Freedom Fighters, a thuggish opposition party appealing to poor blacks with promises of nationalised banks and the confiscation of white-owned land. That, in turn, is pushing the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to sharpen its rhetoric. At a conference in December the party adopted a policy of changing the constitution to allow it to confiscate land without compensation.

Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC’s business-friendly new leader and its candidate in presidential elections in 2019, has cautiously tried to walk a tightrope between radicals in his own party and economic catastrophe. Expropriation could “make this country the garden of Eden”, he has said, but with big caveats: it must not undermine the economy, agricultural production or food security.

That is code for not copying Robert Mugabe, the former president of neighbouring Zimbabwe. When Mr Mugabe started grabbing white-owned commercial farms in 2000, he destroyed far more than a successful agricultural industry. He also smashed what was once one of southern Africa’s most diversified economies. Mining, tourism and manufacturing all collapsed within a few years.

For all its fiery rhetoric, the ANC government has shown remarkably little vigour in using the laws it already has. Its allocation for buying land for redistribution has slumped to less than 0.1% of the national budget. And it is sitting on as many as 4,000 farms that it has bought but not yet handed over to black owners.

The government’s failures do not stop there. Many of the farms that have been handed over have since failed because the new owners do not have the skills needed to run large commercial farms. As much as 70% of the estimated 8m hectares of land transferred by the state since the end of apartheid is now fallow.

Instead of fixing its shortcomings, the government is exacerbating them. In recent years it has stopped transferring ownership of land to black farmers because it frets they may sell it to whites. Instead it now leases the land to black tenants. Without assets to borrow against, these new farmers find it difficult to get capital.

Yet if done well, land reform could salve open wounds. The question is how to do it well. Peter Setou, the chief executive of the Vumelana Advisory Fund, says that partnerships between private investors and communities that are given land seem to work. But confusion around the ANC’s policy on land expropriation deters would-be investors. “We cannot have this level of uncertainty,” he says.

Under another model, known as the 50/50 framework, the government buys land and leases it back to a company co-owned by the farmer and farm workers. Andrew Braithwaite, a fifth-generation farmer, took part in a project that saw longtime workers on his sugar cane farm in KwaZulu-Natal province become co-owners of a farming business. “People feel they have something to lose,” he says. “It adds stability to the nation.”

It isn’t just a matter of farms changing hands. Mr Ramaphosa says that land owned by government departments and municipalities should be released for housing. That would make it easier for people to move to cities, where the jobs are.

As it is, farming generates about 2% of GDP. Voters may like the idea of land redistribution, but not as much as they want good jobs in the city. That is even true for those who were kicked off their land during apartheid: most of those who have lodged claims for restitution have asked the courts to give them cash as compensation instead of farms.