Yhini i-socialism? umhlaba wonke ezandleni zabantu: a critical diagnosis of South Africa’s attempt to amend the constitution to permit expropriation of land without compensation
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Date
2024
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University of the Western Cape
Abstract
The resolution of the land question in South Africa has been a controversial topic since the advent of the democratic dispensation in 1994. To date, the African National Congress (ANC) government has been unable to lead a comprehensive programme of land reform that transfers land from the usurping colonial settler minority to the dispossessed native majority. This has been attributed to a number of factors, ranging from government ineptitude to the constitutional limitations imposed on government in pursuit of land reform objectives. The motion tabled in the National Assembly by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in 2018, to amend the Constitution to provide for expropriation of land without compensation, was the most direct test of the Constitution’s suitability to address the peculiar nature of the country’s settler colonial problem of land distribution. The basis of the motion was rooted in the country’s colonial conquest, and the legitimation of this conquest by a series of colonial laws, which affirm and reaffirm de Sousa Santos coinage of an ‘abyssal line’, more specifically in the development of the law in the country in a manner that excluded native participation. The motion sought to uproot these colonial systems and structures, to dismantle the abyssal line that precluded the dispossessed native from having rights to land. The motion, however, underwent various modifications as a condition for its adoption. The modification moved the motion from actual expropriation without compensation to an exercise of rewording the Constitution to make explicit that which is claimed to be implicit in relation to expropriation of land without compensation.
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Keywords
Expropriation, Compensation, Constitutional Amendment, Property Clause, Land, Parliament