14 A single lease payment says more about power over South Africa’s most expensive wilderness than any glossy safari brochure. Since March 2016, MalaMala Game Reserve has paid an annual fee to a community that, on paper, owns the ground beneath its five-star suites. Yet, more than a decade after that community won its land claim, most of the roughly 5,760 people the settlement was meant to benefit have not seen the proceeds, the Mail & Guardian reported in April 2026. That gap between legal ownership and lived benefit runs through the whole story of private game reserve ownership in South Africa. Private Game Reserve Ownership in South Africa Today In 2014, South Africa had 11,600 registered private game farms covering roughly 21 million hectares, valued at close to US$1 billion. By 2019, consolidation had cut that number to 9,000 farms across about 16 million hectares; the same research notes that there are fewer, larger holdings concentrated in fewer hands. Most of that land is held by families, syndicates, and closed companies rather than by the state. Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, now South Africa’s largest private reserve at over 1,110 square kilometres, exists because one buyer, the late media entrepreneur Stephen Boler, bought up dozens of adjoining farms and stitched them into a single conservation estate, as recorded by Wikipedia. That pattern, individual or family capital consolidating farmland into a private reserve, repeats itself across the Sabi Sand, Timbavati, and Klaserie clusters bordering Kruger National Park. Ownership there increasingly means ownership by outsiders too. Farms in Timbavati (53,000 hectares) and Klaserie (60,000 hectares) rarely change hands, with fewer than a dozen sales across both reserves since 2020. Still, demand from local and international buyers willing to pay between R30 million and R120 million per farm is rising. Property agent Beer Roux told Bizcommunity in 2024 that most current owners are over 65 and approaching retirement. A generational sell-off is coming, and buyers are not waiting for it. MalaMala and the Cost of Correcting the Record MalaMala sits inside the Sabi Sand reserve on land from which the Tsonga people were forcibly removed in the early twentieth century. The Mhlanganisweni community lodged claims against 21 properties, 63 portions, totalling 65,000 hectares. The government settled in 2013 for R939.36 million, later described by some outlets as exceeding R1.1 billion once related costs were included, and then handed the land to the Nwandlamhlarhi Community Property Association at a 2014 ceremony led by then-President Jacob Zuma, according to a Mail & Guardian report in 2020. The settlement did not evict the operators. Instead, it created Mondzo (Pty) Ltd, in which the community’s CPA holds a shareholding that started at 30% and rises to 50% over eleven years, alongside the reserve’s former owners. A lease agreement concluded in March 2016 formalised the arrangement, with MalaMala paying rent directly to the community. That structure looks fair on a shareholder register. It has not felt fair on the ground. The CPA has not held a general meeting since 2013, sits among more than 1,300 Communal Property Associations flagged nationally as non-compliant, and remains gripped by factional disputes over who legitimately represents the beneficiaries. Nationally, 75% to 82% of registered CPAs failed to meet basic reporting obligations in the 2022/23 financial year. Ownership returned to the people who were dispossessed; day-to-day control largely did not. Madikwe Offers a Different Ownership Model Not every reserve tells the same story. Madikwe Game Reserve, a 75,000-hectare Big Five reserve on the Botswana border, was built from the outset as a three-way partnership between the North West Parks and Tourism Board, private lodge operators, and surrounding communities. Communities did not have to win a court case to get a stake. The state retained the land, and the private sector pays concession fees that flow back into community development and employment. Nearly three decades on, the arrangement still gets cited as the country’s clearest template for reserve governance that shares benefit without handing long-term stewardship to a single family trust or an offshore buyer. It works partly because responsibility for the money sits with a public parks board rather than a community trust structure that state institutions rarely audit. ALSO READ: Eswatini Cheetah Reintroduction: Four Cats, 35 Years, One High-Stakes Bet on Safari Tourism Obudu Ranch Concession: Cross River Bets Again on Private Capital to Revive Its Flagship Resort Chad’s Zakouma National Park: Africa’s Quietest Elephant Recovery Story Ownership Structures That Blur Who Owns What Much of South Africa’s game reserve land trades hands not as land at all, but as shares. Many Sabi Sand, Timbavati, and Klaserie farms operate through share block companies, an arrangement under the Share Blocks Control Act 59 of 1980 in which a company holds the title deed and individual buyers purchase shares that confer a right of use rather than direct ownership, according to a 2022 report by Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr. A buyer’s name rarely appears on a deeds office search; the company’s does. Family trusts perform a similar function for reserve estates owned outright, keeping beneficial ownership one step removed from public record. Combine that with an ageing owner base cashing out to buyers who may never live in South Africa, and the question of who really owns this land becomes harder to answer with each transaction, not easier. What the Expropriation Act Could Change, and What It Has Not Parliament passed the Expropriation Act, 2024 (Act 13 of 2024) to replace the apartheid-era 1975 law, and President Cyril Ramaphosa signed it on 20 December 2024. It broadens the definition of “public interest” to include land reform and equitable access to natural resources. It permits nil compensation in specific cases: abandoned land, unused state land, purely speculative holdings, and land whose value rose primarily because of state investment. More than a year after signing, the Act still has not come into force. The required presidential commencement proclamation has not been issued, and the Democratic Alliance and AfriForum have filed constitutional challenges against it, according to a recent Moonstone report. A related Equitable Access to Land Bill, meant to give the Act practical teeth, was still awaiting legal opinion as of the department’s own parliamentary briefing, with that opinion expected only in February 2026. In theory, an idle or speculatively held game farm bought purely for retirement income could someday meet the Act’s own criteria for reduced compensation. In practice, no reserve has been tested against it because the law that would allow such a test is still sitting on a shelf in Pretoria. The RCA Argument The Case for Reform The private reserve sector does not need another land-claim headline; it needs an ownership system that endures the headline. Three changes would do more for land justice than any single settlement has managed. First, community trusts holding reserve equity should face the same disclosure standards as the private companies they partner with: published annual accounts, audited beneficiary registers, and compulsory general meetings, enforced with the same urgency government applies to company filings at the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission. A CPA who cannot show 5,760 beneficiaries to whom the rent went is not functioning as an owner. Second, government and the tourism industry should turn the Madikwe model into policy rather than a case study. A statutory framework requiring new reserve concessions on restituted or claimed land to route revenue through an audited public or parastatal body, rather than a private CPA alone, would close the gap between paper ownership and paid benefit. Third, share block companies and reserve-holding trusts operating on or bordering restituted land should be required to disclose beneficial ownership on a public register, the standard now expected of companies in other high-value sectors. Buyers spending R120 million on a Timbavati farm can absorb that transparency; claimants who have waited a decade for a dividend cannot absorb more opacity. South Africa settled its most expensive land claim more than a decade ago and still cannot say, cleanly, who benefits from the ground beneath MalaMala’s suites. The next generation of restitution deals will be judged not by the size of the settlement cheque, but by whether it hands communities a board seat with real power, or merely a title deed they cannot audit. South Africa’s private game reserve sector has financed a highly lucrative safari economy on ownership models built to settle historical land injustice, not to redistribute it fairly. Until government forces the same transparency on community trusts that it demands of private companies, restitution deals will keep producing paper landlords instead of empowered ones. What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector South Africa’s private reserve model is the continent’s most closely watched test case for wildlife tourism built on private land, and its ownership disputes carry lessons well beyond its borders. Kenya’s conservancy model around the Maasai Mara, Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme, and Namibia’s communal conservancies all wrestle with the same core question: who captures the value when tourists pay premium rates to see wildlife on land communities once occupied. South Africa’s experience shows that a signed land claim is not the end of the story; it is the start of a governance problem that can take a decade or more to resolve, or never resolve at all. For Nigeria, which has no equivalent private game-reserve economy but is actively courting conservation-tourism investment in states such as Cross River, Kaduna, and Kwara, the South African case is a warning about sequencing. Land access agreements struck with host communities before capital is raised, backed by transparent equity structures and independent oversight, will attract investors and better protect communities than agreements negotiated after a lodge is already generating revenue. Nigerian tourism boards weighing public-private wildlife concessions have a live case study in Madikwe’s parks-board model and a cautionary one in MalaMala’s community trust arrangement, and the difference between the two outcomes is almost entirely a matter of who audits the money. This investigation is part of RCA’s ongoing coverage of who controls Africa’s tourism assets, from Kruger’s neighbouring reserves to conservation land across the continent. If land access, ownership, and the economics behind Africa’s safari industry interest you, explore more RCA Intelligence Briefs and Editorials on African tourism policy, conservation finance, and land reform, and keep returning as this story develops. FAQs Who owns most private game reserves in South Africa? Most private game reserve land in South Africa is held by families, syndicates, and closed companies, often through share block structures or family trusts, rather than by the state. A smaller but significant share is held by community trusts formed through land restitution settlements, such as at MalaMala. What happened with the MalaMala land claim? The Mhlanganisweni community’s claim over MalaMala and neighbouring farms was settled in 2013 for R939.36 million. The land was formally restored in 2014, and the community’s Nwandlamhlarhi CPA now holds a rising equity stake in the company that operates the reserve, alongside the original owners, under a lease concluded in March 2016. Does South Africa’s Expropriation Act affect game reserves? Potentially, but not yet. The Expropriation Act, 2024 permits nil compensation in specific circumstances, including speculative or under-used land. Still, the Act has not been brought into force as of 2026, and no game reserve has been tested against it. What makes Madikwe’s ownership model different? Madikwe was structured from its founding in 1991 as a three-way partnership between a provincial parks board, private lodge operators, and surrounding communities, rather than through a land claim settlement. This keeps the land in state hands while distributing tourism revenue through concession fees. Can foreigners buy private game reserve land in South Africa? Yes. Foreign buyers regularly purchase farms in reserves such as Timbavati and Klaserie, often through share block companies, with agents reporting rising demand from international buyers as South Africa’s ageing owner base looks to sell. Big Five tourismGame reserve ownershipLand ownershipSouth African safari 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinTelegramEmail Oluwafemi Kehinde Oluwafemi Kehinde is a business and technology correspondent and an integrated marketing communications enthusiast with close to a decade of experience in content and copywriting. He currently works as an SEO specialist and a content writer at Rex Clarke Adventures. Throughout his career, he has dabbled in various spheres, including stock market reportage and SaaS writing. He also works as a social media manager for several companies. He holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication and majored in public relations.