Property: Expropriation to tackle inner city issues

Government’s accelerated land reform programme will not be limited to agricultural land. It will also address the property rights of people living in informal settlements and inner-city buildings with absentee landlords, notes Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch. President Cyril Ramaphosa made this clear in his response yesterday to a question from DA leader Mmusi Maimane, asking for ‘full details’ of government plans to expropriate land without compensation. Addressing the National Assembly (News24), the President referred to an undertaking by the DA’s Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba: to expropriate inner city buildings without compensation where the owners cannot be found, or reasonable prices negotiated (News24). Noting that the use of expropriation without compensation to advance land reform ‘in certain circumstances’ is ‘entirely consistent with the provisions of the Constitution’, Ramaphosa said that it is the ‘collective responsibility’ of every government authority concerned to use these provisions ‘more directly and … effectively’.

According to the President, ‘the property clause in the Bill of Rights was never constructed for the purpose of retaining existing property relations’. Instead, it was conceptualised as a ‘transformative instrument’ with a view to fundamentally changing those property relations by facilitating the transfer of land and property to South Africans deprived of them ‘through colonial and apartheid policy’. Against that backdrop, the consultation process on a possible amendment to section 25 of the Constitution will include a comprehensive review of its effectiveness as a mandate for radical transformation – ‘identifying shortcomings’ and recommending measures to strengthen land reform policies and programmes introduced since 1994. In that context, acknowledging the lack of progress made in processing the claims of labour tenants, he noted a recent Supreme Court of Appeal ruling that government ‘urgently develop a programme’ to address this.