Frans Cronje of the Institute of Race Relations highlights two common misconceptions about expropriation without compensation. First, that the act will apply only to rural farmland and not urban housing (betterments as well as land), and second, that banks can assume a mortgage loan will remain owing even if expropriation applies. There is a further condition creeping into the current iteration: the process will exclude the courts and be adjudicated by politicians.
The Zimbabwe “land grab” was driven largely by a sense of righteous pain over white usurpation of the best farming land, as well as the greed and envy of elites. But another, more appropriate analogy gives a starker warning. In Mozambique expropriation was driven by pure ideology. And it is the Mozambican model the ANC ideologues begin most closely to mimic...
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