DA has a bold plan to return land to the people

Issued by Thandeka Mbabama MP – DA Shadow Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform
25 Jun 2018 in News

Tomorrow, 26 June 2018, the important work of the Constitutional Review Committee (CRC), tasked with the review of Section 25 of the Constitution – dealing with property rights, begins in earnest as the first of a series of public hearings takes place in the Northern Cape.

Along with my DA colleagues, Dr Annelie Lotriet, Adv Glynnis Breytenbach and Vusumzi Magwebu, we look forward to hearing the voices of ordinary South Africans on the crucial matter of land.

The DA fully supports land reform as a means to address the long history of violent and legislative dispossession of land. The DA wants South Africans to own their land and property because they are the ones who best know how to use their land.

That is why we are opposed to the ANC and EFF proposal to change the Constitution to allow government to expropriate all land without compensation. We oppose any efforts to have all property and land owned by the state, and to make citizens rent their homes and land from the state for life.

What we need is land reform that gives ownership can be achieved immediately without placing the land in state custodianship.

The DA has held, from the beginning, that the move to amend Section 25 of the Constitution is nothing more than misdirection and a distraction from the failure of land reform under the ANC government.

Indeed, the report of the High-Level Panel (HLP), chaired by former President Kgalema Motlanthe, correctly diagnosed the problem with land reform in South Africa when it found that “increasing evidence of corruption by officials, the diversion of the land reform budget to elites, lack of political will, and lack of training and capacity have proved more serious stumbling blocks to land reform.”

The failure of land reform is also not due to the unavailability of land, as revealed in a reply to a recent Parliamentary question posed by the DA which showed that the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform and its entities, by itself, owns or has exclusive rights to nearly 20.7 million hectares of land.

Disagreement and confusion within the ANC has also become rife since the misguided decision to support the EFF’s opportunistic motion on this Constitutional amendment. Indeed, even senior members of government have spoken about their misgivings, none more so than the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Jeremy Cronin, who stated only last week that “the property clause is not an obstacle for effective land reform and land restitution”. Cronin has previously been quoted as saying that he agreed with former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, that “clause 25 is in fact radical in both spirit and in its letter … [and that] it is misguided to blame clause 25 for the weaknesses in land reform”. He rightly concludes that “we don’t need to change the Constitution, we need to implement it”.

Despite our disagreement with the ANC and the EFF over the need to amend the Constitution to allow for expropriation without compensation, we will go into the public hearings with open minds and hearts. We encourage all concerned citizens to participate in the process and will listen respectfully to every submission made at the hearings.

The DA has a bold plan to return land to the people through the biggest land redistribution in South African history. Our plan for land reform includes:

  • Prioritising land reform in the budget and cutting back on unnecessary spending, where the current government is spending more on VIP Protection than it does on land reform;
  • Giving communal land to those living on it, and dividing suitable government-owned land that isn’t being used;
  • Giving title deeds to urban housing beneficiaries;
  • Incentivising voluntary partnerships that will enable farmworkers to own shares in the farms they work on;
  • Supporting those land owners who want to farm through the transference of skills and providing access to the resources and markets they need to sell their goods.