The centre's researchers said the president's comments, made during his annual address to the National House of Traditional Leaders last week, indicated that the government and traditional leaders were engaged in a "closed dialogue" about land reform to the exclusion of communities, several of whom have protested against traditional leaders claiming land on their behalf.
The restitution process was reopened last year for a period of five years following the promulgation of the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act, which allows people who were dispossessed of their land after 1913 to qualify for restitution.
Deviating from his speech the president encouraged traditional leaders to combine resources and hire lawyers to claim land on behalf of communities and criticised them for not taking enough "initiative" on land claims.
"Rather than just individual, isolated communities claiming land... some of the communities having no money to pay lawyers... I requested that we should all come together as traditional leaders and have perhaps one set of lawyers that we can all contribute to.
"They can deploy themselves in different provinces, so that there is no land that remains in the wrong hands simply because we couldn't help the poor with lawyers to help them to claim," Zuma said.
The centre said the president's off-the-cuff remarks - excluded in the version published on the Presidency website - criticised people who complained about poverty but who were not farming.
Zuma called on traditional leaders to take land away from people who were not using the land "productively" emphasising: "You should be charging people that are not farming... the land should be taken from people who are not using it productively and be given to those that are diligent."
The centre said the president had failed to acknowledge the experience of communities who were living "under the rule of autocratic traditional leaders, despite reports of abuse of power and violation of people's land rights by some traditional leaders who claim to represent them".
The centre added: "Also quite alarming is the fact that in his evocative call for traditional leaders to claim land, Zuma did not make any mention of the backlog of 20,000 restitution claims that remain unresolved from before 1998. This signals that the old claims are most likely going to be overlooked in favour of new claims by traditional leaders, which will only further the exclusion of other community-based groups from claiming land.
"Overall the president's speech frames the failure of land restitution as a consequence of communities being unable to afford lawyers to help them claim land, and traditional leaders not claiming land on behalf of communities. This disregards the fact that the national budgetary allocation for the land-reform programme has been slowly decreasing."
The centre said as of January 25% of total claims lodged in 199,498 still had to be settled and 50% of land acquired for restitution had not been transferred to beneficiaries. About 379,000 new claims were expected before 2019.
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