The land issue is going to end badly

It was always going to happen – and yesterday it did: the adoption of the report in favour of an amendment of section 25 of the Constitution to make it possible for the state to expropriate land without compensation in the public interest by the joint constitutional review committee.

In terms of the motion brought by EFF leader Julius Malema, the committee had been tasked to “review and amend section 25 of the Constitution to make it possible for the state to expropriate land in the public interest without compensation” – with no alternative.

And while the motion called for the committee to “conduct public hearings to get the views of ordinary South Africans, policy makers, civil society organisations and academics about the necessity of, and mechanisms for, expropriating land without compensation”, it all seems to have been pointless.

Organisations are already sharpening their legal knives over the committee ignoring most of the submissions, which has said right from the beginning it would never be about the numbers, but the “feeling”.

And once again, it’s the legal fraternity which will have to guide government at tremendous cost.

Is there a need for land reform?

Yes. There is no argument which can stand against this.

Why hasn’t it happened yet?

The ANC has had the reins to the land, the Constitution and reform since 1994, and, relatively speaking, little has happened.

Some claimants have settled for cash, others have taken their land won through an excruciatingly long legal process and made it work for the community – and others have dropped through the cracks with once arable land a place for weed and thistle.

Nor does it have to be about physically owning land: it’s the representation of the influence of a deadlier age on indigenous African people.

Roads, towns, geographical areas named after Boer War generals and heroes, rivers named after some or other Pienaar, all combine to continually rub in people’s faces their places according to apartheid.

Sorry, Mr Pienaar, that little spring was there aeons before you were. It was never yours.

For more than two decades, the ANC has had the means to move quickly on this issue.

Now, staring down the barrel of the 2019 elections and realising the damage protecting former president Jacob Zuma’s malfeasance has wrought, the 106-year-old “revolutionary movement” – which can’t even keep its website up – wants to control land redistribution.

The lesson is: if the ANC had gone into land redistribution with gusto from the beginning, it – and the rest of us – would be in a much better place today.

That nothing has happened is for many a slap in the face, as is the problem now of a burgeoning population, demanding their rightful place on the land.

But how to subdivide a city, because not everyone wants to farm? And with whom lies the authoritative voice on what land is owned by whom and where it is? Do people even want land that much? According to Afrobarometer it is 13th on the list of what we really want.

The land issue is, right now, a mess.

Trying to bludgeon constitutional reform through without definite parameters is a problem. And it’s going to end badly.

Amanda Watson.

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