It would take more than 700 years to complete the land restitution process if claims were reopened and processed at the current pace, a member of the high level panel on key legislation told Parliament on Wednesday. "We have created expectations that can’t be met," Aninka Claassens, director of the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT), told Parliament’s portfolio committee on land reform and rural development. Section 25 (7) of the Constitution says a person or community dispossessed of their land after 1913 due to historically discriminatory laws or practices is entitled to restitution or redress. Claassens said there were already more than 7,000 unsettled and more than 19,000 unfinalised "old order" claims that were submitted between 1995 and 1998. At the current pace of finalising 560 claims a year, they would take at least 35 years to deal with. "New order" claims lodged after 2014 would take 143 years to settle. If the process were to be ...
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