Land: expropriation without compensation

Parliament has just voted to re-examine the clause in the constitution that prohibits arbitrary deprivation of property.

This was introduced by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was also the one who oversaw the drafting of the constitution in the first place, so he should know what he’s doing.

I have certain misgivings about this, because the arbitrary deprivation of property that that clause in the constitution prohibits was one of the features of the National Party government from 1948 to 1994, and that is the kind of behaviour that that clause of the constitution is explicitly designed to prohibit.

In the ethnic cleansing that took place under the apartheid policy of the National Party government, thousands of people were arbitrarily deprived of property with little or no compensation. Part of the intention of this clause in the constitution has also been to allow the government to make restitution for those who were arbitrarily deprived of property in the past, and that process has been slow and cumbersome and badly managed. Changing the constitution on this point, we are told, bill improve this process. But will it?

Back in the 1960s I was a member of the Liberal Party, which was hated by the National Party because of this very issue. The NP regime expropriated land owned by people who belonged to the “wrong” ethnic group for a particular area, and wanted to do so with little or no compensation. The Liberal Party opposed this policy and helped many people who were so deprived to take cases to court to obtain better compensation. This, of course, made the ethnic cleansing exercise more expensive, and thus slowed it down.

One example was Khumalosville in Natal, where black people lived on two-acre plots where they kept a few cattle. Khumalosville was declared a “white” area, so the people who lived there were forced to move to Hobsland. They were offered R42.00 in compensation for their two acres in Khumalosville, and were given a “free” half-acre plot in Hobsland, with the option of buying an additional half acre for R110.00. But even if they did pay the extra to have half the land they had previously owned, the smaller plots would not support the same number of animals.

Twenty-two years after the present constitution came into force, have the people of Hobland had restitution of their land in Khumalosville? I have no idea, and many of them are probably dead by now, and their descendants have probably moved away, and no longer have the animals nor the desire to keep them. Expropriation without compensation will not help them, but it will facilitate the kind of abuse that they suffered under the National Party regime.

Of course the ANC will not do this, and we must trust them not to do that kind of thing even when they want to give themselves the power to do so. But nine years under the Zuptas have shown that no government can be trusted. Put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them.