Last Friday both Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investor Services downgraded South Africa’s sovereign risk rating by a further notch each, pushing the country yet further into junk status. South Africa is now at ‘its lowest credit rating levels…since 1994’, said the Treasury in its reaction.

It may be a bit of a cliché, but if there is a silver lining to be found in the post-COVID economic situation it is the following; policymakers and the industry must put aside ideological differences and adopt a more practical approach to land reform, agricultural development and other economic policies.

Agricultural output could have outpaced even the 70% it is estimated to have grown since 2010.

Smallholders and family farms, Indigenous people, rural women, youth, and landless rural communities are being squeezed into increasingly smaller parcels of land or forced out entirely as global land inequality grows around the world, according to a new report.

As the new year gets under way, property rights – their maintenance or degradation – look set to be a major policy theme.

President Cyril Ramaphosa told the ANC at the start of the year that passing legislation to allow for land expropriation without compensation is a priority for the ruling party this year

2020 marked exactly 368 years since the displacement of indigenous people from their land following the colonisation of the country by the Dutch in 1652, and later the English and the Afrikaner nationalists.

When the Expropriation Bill of 2020 (the Bill) was gazetted in October last year, Deputy President David Mabuza claimed that it would ‘address the injustices of the past and restore land rights’.

Last week my colleague Anthea Jeffery reminded us that the deputy president, David Mabuza, had said that the Expropriation Bill currently before Parliament was necessary to ‘address the injustices of the past and restore land rights’.

Last week my colleague Anthea Jeffery reminded us that the deputy president, David Mabuza, had said that the Expropriation Bill currently before Parliament was necessary to ‘address the injustices of the past and restore land rights’.

Parliament’s ad hoc committee tasked with finalising the expropriation of land without compensation issue is on track to table a bill on the proposed amendments to the constitution by March.

The passage through Parliament of the Expropriation Bill, which is likely later this year, will be a watershed moment in South Africa’s post-1994 politics, with vast implications for the economy. 

I am, as ever, left in astounded awe at how coldly and cruelly some academics and activists of the political left can craft word after word in such measured and careful tones, which, if enacted as policy, could decimate a country’s economy, bring great suffering to millions of its people, and enable the destruction of its democracy.

Money makes the world go round, but what happens when expropriation without compensation (EWC) whirls it the other way? South Africa’s financial sector is about to find out.

Speaking last month to the Progressive Business Forum – a group of BEE and other businesses that pay the African National Congress (ANC) significant sums for increased access to business opportunities – President Cyril Ramaphosa said that 2021 would be a ‘game-changer’ for BEE in South Africa. The key focus would be on how to move the needle on black participation in all sectors of the economy.

While there are several gaps in the proposed Expropriation Bill, at least a step was taken in the South African land reform debate by the republishing of the bill in October 2020 and the window for public comment closing this past Sunday, 28 February.

Both of the parliamentary committees dealing with expropriation without compensation (EWC) bills have breached their constitutional obligations to ‘facilitate public participation’ in the legislative process.

The eviction of farmers from their profitable farming enterprises by “rogue officials” of the department of agriculture, rural development & land reform has resulted in claims of more than R2bn being instituted against the department, according to the 2019/2020 report of the auditor-general.

The partnership-driven model for land reform (the “Karaan Plan”) has been the most successful plan to create a class of profitable black farmers since it was introduced in 2013 and it is also being applied widely elsewhere in Africa.