Tuesday’s defeat of the constitutional amendment for expropriation without compensation – the 204 votes for and 145 against missed the two-thirds threshold of 267 – was on the cards for a while, as  already reported in July. 

This does have an economic impact.

On Saturday, 8 January 2022, the African National Congress (ANC) will celebrate its 110th anniversary.

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.

Expropriation Without Compensation – have South Africa’s citizens merely dodged the bullet? 

Humans have hunted Africa’s animals since the dawn of time, but the arrival of European guns in the 17th century changed the scale of predation.

Now that the ANC’s attempt to rewrite the property clause (Section 25) in the Constitution has been defeated, the ruling party plans to achieve its expropriation-without-compensation (EWC) objectives via the Expropriation Bill of 2020 and the Land Court Bill of 2021. 

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

Now that the ANC’s attempt to rewrite the property clause (Section 25) in the Constitution has been defeated, the ruling party plans to achieve its expropriation-without-compensation (EWC) objectives via the Expropriation Bill of 2020 and the Land Court Bill of 2021. 

The debate regarding compensation for land taken for land reform purposes has been raging ever since the CODESA negotiations and the initial formulation of section 25 of the Constitution.

It’s perhaps somewhat counterintuitive, but what has become understood as the Expropriation without Compensation drive has never been entirely and solely about the ability of the state to take property without paying for it. 

The Expropriation Bill is currently before the Portfolio Committee on Public Works and Infrastructure.

Background The Expropriation Bill is now at a very critical stage in its enactment.

The concept of private property came about as a result of colonial efforts to disenfranchise African people, advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told people gathered at The Forge’s talks on land in South Africa, scheduled to run throughout the month. 

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.

In 1881, Henry George, already famous for his most well-known work, Progress and Poverty, published The Irish Land Question.

We had a budget vote speech and the signing off of the Agriculture and Agro-processing Master Plan this week in South Africa’s agriculture. Both are key for the medium and long-term growth of the sector.

Land reform in South Africa is an emotive and politically fraught subject. That’s because land was at the heart of the dispossession of Africans by colonial settlers.