Land reform: Ramaphosa, Nkoana-Mashabane go back to basics

For the first time since expropriation without compensation in the context of accelerated land reform began to dominate the public policy debate, President Cyril Ramaphosa has explicitly referred to three population groups to whom land will be returned: ‘African, coloured and Indian South Africans’ from whom it was ‘forcibly taken’. This is according to the official text of his address at last week’s centenary celebration of the Afrikanerbond in Paarl, Western Cape province, notes Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch. As Legalbrief Today has already reported, the President also emphasised the importance of ‘securing the rights of labour tenants to … land they have occupied for generations’ and ‘providing land close to urban centres’ to house ‘the poor’ (TimesLIVE).

Interestingly, Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane drew attention last week to a dimension of the debate overlooked by many commentators when she conceded that, by distorting the market, ‘high land prices’ have ‘impeded (the) speedy redress of … imbalances’ in land ownership. Delivering her budget vote speech in the NCOP, the Minister said that, in accelerating land reform, government will ‘pursue a comprehensive strategy that makes effective use of all the mechanisms at … its disposal’, including the ‘consideration of expropriation without compensation’ in the light of a resolution taken at last year’s ANC elective conference. This does tend to suggest that ‘high land prices’ widely associated with the willing-buyer-willing-seller approach to land redistribution may have influenced  the policy change.

Meanwhile, it has yet to be revealed why a ‘colloquium on section 25 of the Constitution’ hosted on Friday by Parliament’s Constitutional Review Committee was only announced one day beforehand – in a media statement posted on the parliamentary website just a few hours before the event began. The colloquium was expected to ‘create a conducive environment for … (the) open discussion and exploration of ideas’ prior to the commencement on 27 June of nationwide public hearings. ‘Various experts’ apparently used the opportunity to warn committee members of the perils of bestowing upon government ‘unfettered powers to expropriate land without compensation’ (Polity).