EXPROPRIATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION
CAROL PATON: Land fever is just a symptom of four far deeper maladies
What business needs to do to survive is to commit to changing the patterns of wealth and poverty in South Africa
Should the ANC find a way to allow expropriation without compensation to coexist along with other criteria for "just and equitable" compensation — such as those enumerated in the Constitution — it will unfortunately not have solved "the land question". Several constitutional law experts, among them former Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs and advocates Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and Geoff Budlender, are certain that expropriation with zero compensation can, under certain circumstances, be just and equitable, as the Constitution says all expropriation must be. But the ANC’s political problems on the land issue are more difficult to solve than changing the Constitution. The first political problem is that it has been caught in a lie by the EFF. While it claimed its mission was to champion the Freedom Charter and it said it believed "the land belongs to all who work it" it has done little to express that in policy. What it favoured was a slow, market-based approach to express this aspira...
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