THE CHALLENGES OF GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATIONS IN THE

Abstract

The discourse on land issues in the contemporary South African political arena has changed considerably since 1994 in resonance with the broader changes in other sectors of society. Principal among the changes is the quest for government to give land back to the majority of the South Africans. Despite constitutional efforts to redress the imbalances of the past the resistance from communities toward policy implementation is persistently plaguing the South African government efforts. This premise of this research assumes that land policies are not communicated well in South Africa despite the government’s efforts to revamp the communication infrastructure and to depict a new vision of information dissemination. The purpose of the study is to examine the extent to which knowledge, skills, education and capacity constraints experienced by the community of Mmakau (North West Province) and Majaneng (Gauteng – formerly in North west Province) in terms of the Land Policy Act are a hindrance to the rollout of the land reform programme in South Africa. The research seeks to test the hypotheses that firstly, rural women of Mmakau and Majaneng in the North West Province do not understand land policy issues because of poor government communications. Secondly both communities expect government communications to be reliable and responsive to their needs and lastly that both communities perceive government communications in policy matters not to be reliable and responsive to their needs. The descriptive analysis of the data uses the mean as an instrument of analysis. The analysis, completed with NCSS software, concluded that there is a need for further research with regard to government communication for rural communities in South Africa