The dangers of the Expropriation Act and SA’s future

The political tsunami that is Donald Trump continues to create monster waves that crash on South African shores. It throws the platitudes of Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address into stark relief: a sideshow only peripherally connected to the new realities that are suddenly reshaping our politics.

Never mind that Trump’s blunderbuss fulminations against the Expropriation Act (EA) were partly inaccurate.

As was the case with his 2018 railing against a supposed genocide of white farmers, the exaggerations and distortions of his claims should not detract from some important truths about what is happening in South Africa.

The first inescapable truth is that farmers are disproportionately the targets of murderous criminality. Also, the gruesome nature of the violence is likely, albeit empirically impossible to prove, tied to hateful incitement spewed by black radicals who have the tacit approval of the ANC.

The second truth is that the EA is not just a benign bit of legislative housekeeping that virtuously ties together in a constitutional bow some previous omissions, duplications and contradictions in the law.

The EA is by far the most dangerous and legislatively cunning piece of legislation passed by the ANC. If fully exploited by a malevolent state it would endanger all private wealth – not only your farm in the countryside, but your erf in the city and the savings in your pension fund – and kill foreign investment stone dead.

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Expropriation legislation is commonplace worldwide. In functional democracies it allows the state to expropriate for public purpose, most commonly for transport corridors or infrastructural developments like power or pipelines.

In these countries, the process is transparent and challengeable, the compensation is fair and impartially determined.

However, in contrast to best international practice, South Africa’s EA is monstrous in several aspects.

Land deemed “abandoned” – conceivably, for example, if a farmer has been unable to remove land invaders – can also be seized without compensation.

A KwaZulu-Natal businessman who sold his land holdings some years ago in despair over the ANC’s inability to manage an orderly land reform and redistribution process, warns that the EA “will change the very fabric of society” in South Africa. “Whatever he got wrong, Trump got the racial connotation right,” he says.

“Anyone who has had experience of the tactics being employed by the government for acquiring land for redistribution will recognise how the process will unfold. Target parcels or farms adjacent to tribal and township areas or, on a larger scale, buy alternate farms in a block, move in black tenants and wait.

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“Withhold all police or state support and use stock theft, vandalism, poaching, fence cutting, petty theft and intimidation to make the cost of property protection untenable, thereby forcing the land owner to move off the property. Then take it. Previously, for a song, but subject to long delays if the owner was intractable. Now, immediately and for nothing.”

The supposed legal protections that Ramaphosa and the DA are emphasising, he says, are nothing but a sop.

“They know full well that resorting to the courts is cost- and time-prohibitive in all but the biggest cases. And considering that the state becomes the owner the instant the notice is issued, by the time any judgment is issued, the worth of the item or compensation in question will have been whittled away to nothing.’

A wastrel, incorrigibly kleptocratic ANC, whose greatest threat is from political parties on the hard left and is itself stacked to the rafters with populist leaders like Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi.

What could possibly go wrong?