Land claimants urged to verify status of outstanding claims

Photo: Robin Hammond

Political expediency drives land expropriation without compensation

South African and other observers of current discussions in the country about the politically manufactured need to amend the Constitution in order to effect the expropriation of land without compensating know that these processes are driven largely by short-term electoral expediency.

Land claimants urged to verify status of outstanding claims

Photo: Robin Hammond

The ANC, which has been in power for almost a quarter of a century, was a leading driver in the process to develop South Africa’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, in the early 1990s.

In fact, this goes deeper than that. Many will recall that President Cyril Ramaphosa himself chaired the Constitutional Assembly, the body that drove that process, and was therefore at the forefront of the constitution drafting process. He’s also the one who handed over the final constitution to then President Mandela ahead of it being signed and formally adopted as the supreme law of the country.

The Constitution had Section 25 on Property Rights then as it still does today, unchanged and still providing the same leverage to any government of the day to implement its policies in accordance with it. The ANC has, therefore, no excuse to claim ignorance about what the constitution says and allows it to do, in terms of land reform, also outlined in Section 25 of the Constitution.

So, what could have happened to make the ANC, still in power twenty-four years later, suddenly see the need to talk about amending the constitution in order to do what it has always been able to do without the need to temper with the supreme law of the land? And why would the ANC, if it still wants to be considered a moderate, centre-left party, agree to hold hands with the EFF, a self-declared racist, extreme left-wing party, in order to get the required two-thirds majority in the National Assembly so that it can make changes to the Constitution?

One way to look for answers is, sadly, by going back to the late 2000s and by crossing our northern border into Zimbabwe. Feeling electorally threatened by the advent of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the local political scene, Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe saw it fit to go for the jugular and place the land ownership question on the table.

Land ownership was an emotive issue in Zimbabwe then as it is in South Africa today. It is used with worrying success by desperate politicians having run out of new ideas to rally emotions and make false promises to poor, often uneducated and gullible, masses.

Armed with a rhetoric based on the need to take land back from white citizens, opportunistically branded “white settlers”, and hand it back to black Zimbabweans, Mugabe was able to divert attention from the many failures of his government, increased unemployment and poverty levels, as well as high levels of corruption in his party and government. He suddenly remembered promises ostensibly made by the British government during the Lancaster House discussions in December 1979 that paved the way for the creation and recognition of an independent Zimbabwe. Sadly, many Zimbabweans believed him when he placed the cause of their poverty at the door of “white settlers”.

Anyone who seemed to stand in the way of Mugabe, particularly in support of the MDC, was treated as the enemy, tortured, jailed and made to flee their country. Many activists are still unaccounted for, to this day. In a climate of widespread intimidation and fear during which the MDC was branded as a CIA and M16 creation (respectively, American and British spy agencies) Mugabe’s Zanu-PF positioned itself as a victim of a Western onslaught.

Word was made to make the rounds that the MDC was established as a “Western front” with the aim to reverse the gains of independence and institute regime change. Any evocation of “regime change”, even in contemporary South Africa, suffices to frighten gullible, often uninformed voters to rally around and stick with “the devils they know”, i.e. their former liberators who have, over the years, turned into despots.

Back to South Africa, and with Jacob Zuma out of the way, the firebrand Julius Malema, also known as the Commander-in-Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), has had to quickly find another low hanging fruit to anchor his party’s electoral fortunes onto. He looked around and found the seemingly unclaimed land question and lurched onto it. Malema’s admiration of Mugabe is an open secret for many observers of his political drive.

The ANC, knowing the power and appeal of the land issue, and having seen how young voters have responded to Malema, decided that it would have none of it. With its own ANC Youth League decimated long ago and existing by name only, it couldn’t afford to see the EFF positioning itself as the party that would deliver land to them, following 24 years of non-delivery by the ANC.

So, in essence, everything the ANC does on the land question is driven largely by two fears. The first one is the realisation that its massively reduced reputational fortunes will lead to huge electoral losses in 2019, following a decade of kleptocratic leadership by Zuma, enabled by the party; and the second is the prospect of losing control over state institutions that have served as conduits for self-enrichment for many individuals and entities linked to the ANC; some people even suspect that the party itself might have benefitted handsomely from hundreds of millions of rand in public funds diverted from service to the people of South Africa.

Given everything that is at stake and the hope that many South Africans had placed in him, Ramaphosa will have to be careful in juggling the interests of his political party against those of South Africa, knowing that what is good for the ANC is not always good for South Africa, and what is good for South Africa is not always good for the ANC.

The question is, in building his legacy in the period leading to the next elections, which of the two masters does he want to be remembered to have served well; the ANC or South Africa? Given the conflicting sets of interests, it is proving to be impossible to serve both.