For a country desperate for higher rates of investment to ignite sustainable economic growth, the Expropriation Bill, and the headlines that have accompanied its passage through parliament’s consultation processes, could not have been more poorly timed.

Coverage of the bill has cast it as the legalisation of what is presumed soon to become a vast wave of theft and looting as officials across the land use their powers of expropriation to denude property owners of all kinds of assets, not just land...