The uncertainty and fear around land expropriation has already created pressure within the banking and property industry, says Cas Coovadia, managing director of the Banking Association SA (Basa).

In a recent Investment Research Note put out by Nedbank Private Wealth, political analyst JP Landman claims to be ‘cutting through the noise’ surrounding the draft constitutional amendment bill introducing expropriation without compensation (EWC). However, his analysis is fundamentally flawed.

A LARGE number of farms in South Africa are no longer being used to produce food – a cause of huge concern following one of the worst droughts in the country's history.

South Africa’s ruling party is forging ahead with plans to change the constitution to make it easier for the government to expropriate land without paying for it.

Though there has been a decline in public participation on the proposed amendment of the constitution to make it easier for the state to expropriate land without compensation, a majority of participants still oppose the amendment, according to an analysis by an NGO.

Land reform was never going to be easy. To tackle it, the new government shaped a coherent programme in 1994, involving three components: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. But the laws and policies put in place in that hopeful era have been ignored and overridden in practice.

Land expropriation without compensation will only benefit the elite at the cost of South Africa.

South Africa's slow land claims process is set to face even more delays - this time due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In recent years, the ongoing land debate in South Africa has been drawing a lot of the world’s attention.

The COVID-19 crisis has clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the livelihoods of many South Africans, and highlighted food insecurity as one key aspect.

The South African agriculture sector has the potential to be amongst the sectors that will drive economic growth and job creation during the post-COVID-19 recovery phrase.

There is consensus that land reform is an indispensable yet complicated process often overloaded with multiple objectives including economic, social and political underpinnings.

South Africa’s poverty levels have increased sharply over the past five years with an additional 3 million people now classified as living in absolute poverty.

Parliamentarians are greatly concerned that the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development has had to slice some R2.4 billion from its R16.8 billion budget.

South Africa's land reform programme was supposed to ensure that the impoverished get to own and work the land. Now, only the politically connected and economically included are benefitting.

President Robert Mugabe’s notorious land reforms in the early 2000s robbed thousands of Zimbabwean farmers of their land, and of their livelihoods.

On Thursday 3 September the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) hosted an online discussion on land activism in South Africa. The discussion was moderated by Boaventura Monjane, a postdoctoral researcher from PLAAS.

On August 31, the government of Zimbabwe announced that foreign white farmers settled in the country who lost land between 2000 and 2001 under former President Robert Mugabe's controversial programme of land reform designed to empower landless Black peasants could apply to get it back.

Land reform is central to South Africa's quest for social justice. During the apartheid era, land was concentrated in the hands of the white minority.

The African National Congress (ANC) is determined to use Parliament as a mere rubber stamp for its December 2017 decision to amend Section 25 of the Constitution (the property clause) to allow expropriation without compensation (EWC). And Parliament continues to go along with this – and to pretend that it is doing a proper job on the most important legislative change ever to come before it since 1994.