JUSTICE MALALA: Out there on the ground, land expropriation without compensation is well underway
'It lacks the guiding hand that Ramaphosa has been talking about over the past weeks. The people carving out the land are collecting cash, exploiting legitimate calls for faster land reform'
EXTRACT
This failure to ensure that property rights are protected while implementing an all-encompassing, efficient, just and equitable land reform programme will always come back to bite us. It is a recipe for anarchy.
Well, on Saturday you will have read on TimesLIVE that three black Limpopo landowners had approached the courts and forced Police Minister Bheki Cele and Soshanguve station commander Brigadier Samuel Thine to take action against people who invaded their land in Onderstepoort‚ north of Pretoria.
Dr Motodi Samuel Maserumule and his business partners approached the courts after four farms belonging to their company‚ Akubra Trading‚ were occupied and subdivided.
I hate to say I told you so, but there it is: I told you so. The chickens are coming home to roost, exactly as I said they would. What am I talking about? It’s the land issue. There are two things we all need to keep in mind about the land debate. First, we just don’t know quite how bad land ownership disparity between black and white is because the state and the private sector don’t quite know themselves. Agri SA says 26.7% of agricultural land is owned by black people and the government, meaning about 70% of agricultural land is in white hands. The state’s land audit says 72% of agricultural land is white-owned, with 24% black-owned. Those numbers are bad. Anyone who doesn’t realise that we need to fix this is mad. The second thing to keep in mind is this: the ANC has been in power since 1994. In that time it has done nothing to use the Constitution to enable faster land reform. When it has attempted land reform it has been in a haphazard, half-hearted, inefficient and largely cor...
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