Committee must consider public opinion on EWC

Parliament’s Joint Constitutional Review Committee has received more than 720 000 comments on the necessity of expropriating land without compensation (EWC). Its job is to ensure – in the words of the Constitutional Court – that citizens are given ‘a meaningful opportunity to be heard in the making of laws that will govern them’. Despite this daunting task, the committee is determined to finalise its report by 15 November, so that it can be debated and voted on before the end of that month. The committee – says the Institute of Race Relations’ Dr Anthea Jeffery, in an opinion piece on the Politicweb site – is planning to read and analyse more than 700 000 comments in the space of some six weeks. ‘That requires it to read and assess the contents of more than 115 000 documents a week, or 23 000 every working day.’ She argues that as no comprehensive analysis can be done in that time, the committee may make the recommendation ‘it has been planning to embrace from the start – that EWC is indeed necessary and that the Constitution must be amended to allow this, as President Cyril Ramaphosa prematurely announced at the end of July’. Noting that the committee has a mandate to examine whether EWC is needed at all, she says Parliament is supposed to represent the people of SA, not an ‘ideologically driven’ ANC elite. ‘The committee has the power to heed the hundreds of thousands of objections it has received and to report back to Parliament that the ANC/EFF plan for EWC is neither necessary nor what the majority of South Africans desire.’ Jeffery adds if the committee disregards what ordinary people have told it, ‘it will be reneging on a vital constitutional obligation to facilitate public participation in the law-making process’. She says it cannot simply shrug off this obligation ‘in pursuit of an unrealistic timetable and its own preferences on the EWC issue’.

Full analysis on the Politicsweb site