Abstract
The past four years have seen fierce debates over a radical proposal aimed at speeding up the redistribution of land in South Africa—the expropriation of privately-owned land without the payment of compensation. The proposal and its reception must be located within the complex politics of land in the post-apartheid era, in a context where land reform is widely seen as failing to live up to its promise. The notion that ‘expropriation without compensation’ (EWC) offers a simple solution to the many problems facing land reform in South Africa is critically assessed and found wanting. To address the wider problems of land reform and ensure that it’s potential is realized, the state must address other key aspects of policy—beyond simply land acquisition and its cost. These include specifying the socio-political purposes of land reform, intended beneficiaries, anticipated impacts on livelihoods, the nature of land rights to be held by beneficiaries, and building capacity for effective implementation. But government is unlikely to do so on its own accord; sustained pressure ‘from below’, exerted by potential beneficiaries themselves as well as their allies in civil society and the state, will be required. Popular politics is thus key to the prospects for appropriate and effective land policy in South Africa.
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Notes
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Land in the rural context is emphasized here, as was the case in the first twenty years of land reform. In recent years urban land, mainly for settlement purposes, has become another key focus of land reform policy.
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I discuss the constitutional framework in relation to expropriation of property in more detail below.
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The Natives Land Act of 1913, which formalised longstanding processes of land dispossession across the country, was adopted on the 19th June 1913.
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This characterisation of the political terrain in relation to land policy reflects the broad contours of the debate, but not the details of the positions adopted by different groupings and analysts, which are much more complex. Some combine elements of both ‘left’ and ‘right’ critiques. For example, two eminent liberal historians have co-authored a book (Beinart et al. 2017) and several articles (e.g. Beinart and Delius 2018) which suggest that government has neglected the interests of the rural and urban poor, echoing many ‘left’ critics. But they also call for individual land titling to become the predominant form of property right, the promotion of black commercial farming (rather than smallholders), and preservation (rather than restructuring) of the large-scale commercial farming sector, echoing critics from the ‘right’. Similarly, diverging views on the role of traditional leaders in relation to land have long been in evidence amongst land NGOs, despite their perspectives being generally ‘left-leaning’ in character.
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Mngxitama (2005) suggests that tensions within the NLC before its demise reflected fundamental differences in political ideology, with many of its provincial affiliates having their origins in a liberal response to late apartheid violence and dispossessions, but by the mid-1990s becoming a home for more radical views as well.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_Fighters (accessed 14 December 2020).
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This arrangement is not legislated, but is an accepted practice or tradition of the ANC.
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Cousins, B. (2021). Land Reform in South Africa: The Politics of Expropriation Without Compensation. In: Chitonge, H., Harvey, R. (eds) Land Tenure Challenges in Africa. Economic Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82852-3_5
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