SACP Secretary General Blade Nzimande. Picture: Yeshiel Panchia
The South African Communist Party (SACP) said on Monday it welcomed the policy of expropriation of land without compensation as another means of achieving land reform.
“While we do not believe that the existing constitutional requirement of paying just and equitable not market compensation has remotely been an impediment to serious land reform, in fact, the constitutional right to expropriate in the public interest has never been used for land restitution,” the party’s general secretary, Dr Blade Nzimande, said during a press briefing.
He said the country’s constitution made provisions for the state to determine the amount to be paid as compensation for expropriated land, which is hardly used by the government.
“So we do not want this then as a populist measure that we also go for this expropriation without compensation, and we still do nothing about it,” Nzimande said.
Another party that has called on the policy to be implemented without fail is the EFF, which intends to table a motion in parliament tomorrow on the policy.
READ MORE: EFF plans to table a motion on land expropriation without compensation
Nzimande said the implementation of the policy would “move land reform … out of its current confused and spineless dead end”.
“In general, the SACP aligns itself with the findings and recommendations of the high-level panel chaired by former President Kgalema Motlanthe on the land question,” the general secretary said.
The panel’s findings include:
He added that budgeting for “effective and productive” land reform has not been thorough.
“The focus has been on necessary but limited land restitution at the expense of forward looking land redistribution and security of tenure, especially for those, mainly women often living under patriarchal arbitrary subjection in the former Bantustans and farmworkers on commercial farms,” Nzimande said.
He said the land issue had mainly tended to focus on rural areas while urban areas are faced with the critical challenge of radical transformation.
“The property market [in urban areas] produces and exacerbates apartheid space with as much cruelty and forced removals and the all group areas legislation once did,” Nzimande said.
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