SA’s agricultural sector is finalising the sector master plan.

For more than a decade the Institute of Race Relations has fought a dogged defence of property rights in South Africa. 

The ANC has always claimed a unique entitlement to act, speak, and rule on behalf of South Africa’s black majority.

The ad hoc committee tasked with amending section 25 of the constitution was due to submit its report to the National Assembly on May 31, but obtained an extension until the end of August.

The drive to amend section 25 of the constitution — to allow for the expropriation of property without compensation — was stopped in its tracks after opposition parties, including the EFF, rejected the ANC’s proposed changes.

The ANC has always promoted the virtues of redistributing wealth and, more recently, using expropriation without compensation as a means to achieve this. Well, now we’ve had a real-world experiment.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has conceded that the country’s land reform programme is taking too long to address the challenge of land ownership inequality in South Africa.

News reports over the past weeks have suggested that the ANC and EFF have reached an impasse over the proposed amendment to Section 25 of the Constitution.

The government approved a women empowerment policy in 2020 proposing that about 50% of the allocation of agricultural farming land under the redistribution programme should be for women, 40% for youth, and 10% for people living with disabilities.

It’s been an eventful week on the Expropriation without Compensation front.

Pam Saxby wrote on the Constitution 18th Amendment Bill in Daily Maverick of 13 September 2021, asking if Parliament is putting the cart before the horse by trying to finalise the Expropriation Bill before finalising the Constitutional Amendment Process. We would like to engage with some of the questions raised in the opinion piece.

In September 2021 a new opinion poll commissioned by the IRR showed that only 5% of South Africans think land reform should be one of the two top priorities for the government to address.

It’s now almost 25 years after the end of apartheid and the land question inside Africa’s most powerful economy still remains largely unresolved.

Land reform is arguably one of the most challenging undertakings that the post-1994 government has embarked on and it remains a critical part of restorative justice that seeks to address the legacy of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid.

The National Assembly has rejected the ANC’s bid to expropriate land without compensation, denying the ruling party a two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution to that effect.

I believe it is inevitable that, with the continuing economic crises engulfing South Africa, the government will look for ways to relieve public pressure and divert attention away from its myriad failures during the pandemic and the disastrous lockdowns which have hamstrung the economy and worsened food insecurity, joblessness and social instability.

For most agricultural subsectors, South Africa is emerging from one of the best years.

South Africa is a diverse and sizable country of 122 million hectares. But there is a commonality in challenges that farmers and agribusiness raise regardless of the provinces or municipalities.

For somewhat over a decade now, a theme in South Africa’s land politics has been whether a new system of landholding is necessary. This is a different issue from the problems of forcible dispossession in the past or the distribution of property ownership today, but is arguably of greater importance.

The Freedom Charter retains an intense emotional hold on many South Africans, often being presented as a sort of arbiter of what South Africa’s future should hold.