Laurel Oettle’s experience covers land rights and justice, food systems change and climate change adaptation, women’s empowerment, HIV/AIDS, economic development, and community development.
She is a non-profit leader and an advocate for deep-rooted social change. Her current work focuses on securing land ownership for farm dwellers and labour tenants, the provision of water and basic services on privately-owned land, food system transformation, and agroecology.
Oettle says: “The alt-right are expert bull-fighters, waving red flags in all directions to keep us so busy fighting against their obvious lies and disinformation that we have little time left to see what their real intentions are – let alone organise ourselves.
“The fact that Trump has now jumped on the white Afrikaner genocidal lie and used South Africa’s Expropriation Act of 2024 to further obfuscate, is the height of distraction.
“Similarly, the South African government has tried to use this same Act to distract us from the utter failure of South Africa’s land reform programmes.
“While this purports to provide a more Constitutionally aligned, modern framework it is no silver bullet that will magically overcome the weak governance, lack of political will, corruption, and poor administration that have hampered land reform from the get-go. At the very least we can say that it makes gestures in the right direction, and activists and civil society organisations have already begun to test it to unlock the injustices of land dispossession.”
