Whose land, whose power?

Deep in the Eastern Cape, the Wesley-Ciskei Wind Farm offers a unique lens into the complexities of South Africa’s just energy transition and its intersection with land ownership.

- Tunicia Phillips

While most wind farms in the province are situated on white-owned private farmland, the Wesley-Ciskei project involves 11 black landowners in the former Transkei and Ciskei homelands, sites of land dispossession and racial segregation during the apartheid era.

The birth of the wind development some 15 years ago was led by a local professional who grew up on Riverbank Farms near Hamburg. Zukisani Jakavula, along with an international partner, painstakingly worked to identify and certify beneficiaries of deceased estates tied to 12 families and 11 properties. The deeds for these properties had last been updated in the late 1800s.

"We were not dealing with one owner here, we were dealing with generations and generations. The idea was for them to form 11 family trusts and have those trusts for beneficiaries. That took quite a while,” he said.

Jakavula is a founding partner of the project, a family beneficiary through his parents’ ownership and a shareholder in a community shareholding that was acquired by the local farming cooperative in the wind farm, situated in the village of Nyulutsi, between East London and Port Alfred.

Just Energy, a section 21 company established by Oxfam for the development of wind farms involving community ownership, signed leasing agreements with the landowners in 2012.

In 2015 the project was acquired by the current owner, EDF Renewables, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French utility EDF Group.

“Just Energy had to do a lot of work to convert deceased estates into functional family trusts with the descendants as beneficiaries of the trusts,” said Louis Dewavrin, the head of project development for EDF Renewables.

As title deed-carrying landowners with secure land rights, “they can negotiate the option to lease agreements for renewable energy projects — something other communities who are still waiting for the transfer of their land in their name cannot do”, he said.