NATIONALISATION
TIM COHEN: Communal land will be the real headache in land reform saga
The ANC wants South Africans to focus on the nationalisation of commercial farmland (which it describes as "white land", despite the fact that millions of black people are totally dependent on the success of these enterprises), and obviously this is the crunch area. In some ways, though, land in traditional areas is actually more important to how South Africans really live, and it will be one of the sad outcomes of this disastrous policy choice that the focus on expropriation without compensation will take away any focus from what is called "traditional land". The ANC is inevitably going to have trouble controlling its ambit. And it doesn’t help that its partner in this enterprise, the EFF, wants all land, including traditional land, nationalised. The ambit problem was very evident recently when President Cyril Ramaphosa rushed to KwaZulu-Natal to visit King Goodwill Zwelithini to assure him that the government had no intention of changing any aspect of the Ingonyama Trust, which ow...
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