We have the land, we have the hands, but where is the plan to put them together so that our country can actually work?” This question rings in my ears every time I think about land in South Africa.
I ask it when I go home to Mqanduli in the Eastern Cape, and see the chaos of rural sprawl and the way it constrains peoples’ lives and compromises their livelihoods.
I ask it when I visit informal settlements in Gauteng or KwaZulu-Natal and meet young people with no prospect of employment. With no place they can call their own, no place they will ever own.
I ask it when I visit farming areas in the Free State or Western Cape and meet workers who provide the food that keeps this nation alive but have no security of tenure.
The land is there: there is more than enough in this beautiful country for all of us. The hands are there: we have a youthful population desperate to make a better life for themselves and their families. What we have not had, for the first 30 years of our democracy, is a workable plan around what we at Rise Mzansi call “land justice”.
We have begun to answer the question in our People’s Manifesto: “The availability and distribution of land to all South Africans who need it is central to our nation-building efforts, and is a challenge that must be addressed within a generation.”
Instead of workable policy in recent years, South Africa has had criminal negligence on the part of the ANC government. This has brought us to a point where the land reform process has stalled, where rational spatial planning barely exists, and where the state has been unable to deliver the “adequate housing” guaranteed by Section 26 of the Constitution, obliging the state to “take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right”. As a result, South Africans have been forced into the illegal occupation of land in some instances, and forced off the land in others.
Scare tactics
Instead of reasonable debate on the issue, we have had populist and scaremongering rhetoric — especially around the phrase “land expropriation without compensation”. This takes us nowhere.
On one side there is the EFF, talking impossibly about the return of all land to black people. On the other side there is the DA, trumpeting the rights of property owners with such shrillness that it just sounds like white privilege protecting itself, so blind to land hunger that it is unable to come up with any equitable land policy at all.
Both sides see “land” as a zero sum: if I get some, you lose some. Neither side seems to recognise that our only path forward is one that finds space for all of us in this capacious land — black, brown and white; rich and poor; rural and urban.
Of course, land is a finite resource. But proper planning can increase its value, and its yield, exponentially. Ask any farmer. The better we plan, the more we can grow.
What happens when the Expropriation Bill is passed?
Understood in this frame, “land expropriation without compensation” really is a red herring. It has been weaponised to scare South Africans away from each other, rather than bringing us together.
The truth is that any functional state must be able to have this mechanism, and in South Africa, as everywhere else, it has always been used: for dams, highways, and other strategic priorities. As our best legal scholars, people like Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, have already pointed out, there was not even a need to amend the Constitution to permit this. The state’s right to do it has always been there.
The question is not whether the state should expropriate land without compensation. The question is rather whether this expropriation is being done as part of a broader development plan — one that is, in turn, part of a viable plan for social and economic recovery, from the local up to the national level.
Understanding expropriation
Let’s understand “expropriation” for what it is: just one instrument that can be activated to bring about meaningful land reform. Let’s focus instead on what really matters: which is getting that plan right and putting into government the right people to implement it.
That plan looks roughly like this.
First, let us do a proper survey of land ownership and occupancy in South Africa. Without accurate information, it is not possible to make informed policy choices. This will enable us to understand who owns land, who occupies it without title, such as most people in the former homeland in which I was born. We will also be able to know who is “squatting”, their housing and sanitation conditions.
Second, we must take account of immediate and long-term needs, such as food security, urbanisation, rural stock farming and population growth. The need for land is always growing with an increasing population, so the decisions we take now must still produce results in 30 years’ time.
Third, we must do proper spatial planning that includes rural communities. This means reaching agreement with traditional authorities on land planning and allocation so that there is space to provide bulk and network infrastructure in advance. Stock farmers would benefit greatly from such an arrangement as unplanned land allocation is making it increasingly difficult to sustainably raise stock.
Finally, we can decide how much expropriation is needed for the above public purposes, as our Constitution allows us to do. There is no need to be hysterical about it.
South Africa has historical land injustice and has current and future needs. It is simply not possible to retain the current land ownership and occupancy patterns and still be a just society. Anyone who identifies with our constitutional values must as a matter of necessity also believe in land justice as our common obligation, rather than as a victim.
Victims are the landless, under-serviced and ignored — and they deserve as much justice as everyone else.
