PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA – NOVEMBER 01: Congress of the People (Cope) leader Mosiuoa Lekota outside the Pretoria High Court during the State Capture report case on November 01, 2016 in Pretoria, South Africa. Judge Dunstan Mlambo ruled in favour of the opposition parties on their bid to intervene in President Jacob Zuma’s bid to stop the release of the “state capture” report. (Photo by Gallo Images / Beeld / Cornel van Heerden)
Read: ‘White people bought or negotiated for their land’ Mosiuoa Lekota
Controversial comments of a different kind.
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA – NOVEMBER 01: Congress of the People (Cope) leader Mosiuoa Lekota outside the Pretoria High Court during the State Capture report case on November 01, 2016 in Pretoria, South Africa. Judge Dunstan Mlambo ruled in favour of the opposition parties on their bid to intervene in President Jacob Zuma’s bid to stop the release of the “state capture” report. (Photo by Gallo Images / Beeld / Cornel van Heerden)
Congress of the People (COPE) leader Mosiuoa Lekota has publically come out against the general assumption that land was stolen from black people. Lekota spoke on Talk Radio 702 on Monday, he says the land was exchanged after “negotiations” took place.
“This word ‘stolen’ is a very unfortunate word. Look at the Cape for instance how that happened, [there were negotiations] between the Khoi and the Dutch initially and later on of course the English took over but there was a title introduced there, until that time there was no title (deed),”
Lekota also says that he does not want black South Africans to have the impression that every white person has land.
“We must not leave our people with a wrong impression that every white person you see walking the streets is owning a land. The families that own the land are the families that bought them. And they are obliged to give them back to government if a title deed is produced that ‘this is my land’.”
In the last few months, President Zuma has looked to take a page out of the EFF playbook by calling for land expropriation without any form of compensation. It has always been the view of the ANC that land expropriation should happen with a “willing buyer, willing seller” method.
Lekota though, values title deeds very highly, he says they allowed for anyone to “raise money and be able to own their own land.” He also says title deeds make it easier to identify the true owners of specific land. Lekota continued with his controversial comments, saying that black people did not originally own land in the South, they just “occupied” it when they came from the North.
“We, the so-called Bantu speaking South Africans, came from the North, from the Great Lakes, we over ran territory here which was occupied by the Khoi and the San. There was no title, we just occupied that land. We were not even the original residents here. The people we call Baroa, the People of the South – Ba boroa, the People of the South, it’s the Khoi, the people we found here,”
