Cry for land resounds in citizens’ pleas
Total of seven provincial meetings have already been held as March cut-off date looms for submissions
Local and international singer Miriam Makeba gave voice to it in her 1960s song Mabayeke: Give us our land. It is a cry that has not yet grown quiet, 23 years into democracy. It is reverberating through the provincial public hearings being held by the high-level panel on assessment of key legislation and acceleration of fundamental change.
At the seven provincial public hearings held so far, people have come — sometimes hitchhiking great distances — to tell the panel of their problems with access to land for farming, land for housing, secure tenure on the land they occupy, access to mineral rights and beneficiation of minerals, restitution for apartheid-era land dispossession and the slow pace of land reform programmes. It is not surprising that land features so prominently. After all, the apartheid government forcibly removed about 3.5-million people in the years up to the 1960s.
The panel’s seven provincial public hearings held so far have been in diverse venues — church property in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Mpumalanga; a newly built Northern Cape convention centre named after an anti-apartheid struggle activist; in the city centre in Bloemfontein and Durban; and at the Johannesburg City Hall — less than 10km from Sophiatown, that vibrant multiracial suburb condemned to forced removals in the 1950s.
As anti-apartheid activist and cleric Father Trevor Huddleston poignantly reflected in Naught For Your Comfort, his inspirational 1956 book: “Sophiatown! How hard it is to capture and to convey the magic of that name! Once it is a matter of putting pen to paper all the life and colour seems to leave it: and failing to explain its mysterious fascination is somehow a betrayal of one’s love for the place. It is particularly important for me to try to paint the picture that I know and that is yet so elusive, for in a few years Sophiatown will cease to exist.… And, in a few years, men will have forgotten that this was a living community and a very unusual one.” Almost all of Sophiatown was, indeed, destroyed and then rebuilt and renamed Triomf for white occupation. But it remained etched in the minds of South Africans. In 1998, following his death, Father Huddleston’s ashes were interred at the Christ the King Church where he had been active all those years. In 1999 the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre opened in one of the few houses that escaped the apartheid bulldozers — that of Dr AB Xuma, ANC president-general from 1940 to 1949. And in 2006 Sophiatown got its name back!
District Six, the similarly vibrant suburb nudging the Cape Town city centre, suffered a similar fate to that of Sophiatown. Its spirit and community, also, have not been forgotten.
These two suburbs symbolised the brutality of the systematic forced removal of entire communities off prime land to peripheral areas. But there were many, many other communities all across the country that apartheid’s jackboot of forced removals tore apart.
The Constitution, signed into law by President Nelson Mandela on December 10 1996, is the supreme law, provides the legal foundation for the existence of SA’s democratic state, sets out citizens’ rights and duties and defines the government’s structure and obligations. Clause 25 of the Constitution allows for land to be expropriated for a public purpose or in the public interest.
The Constitution defines the public interest to include “the nation’s commitment to land reform and to bring about equitable access to all SA’s natural resources” and sets out the terms for compensating owners of land earmarked for expropriation. The compensation must be just and equitable, reflecting an equitable balance between the public interest and the interests of those affected, having regard to all relevant circumstances. According to the Constitution these include the current use of the property, the history of its acquisition and use, its market value, the extent of direct state investment and subsidy in the acquisition and beneficial capital improvement of the property, and the purpose of the expropriation.
In addressing the restitution and redistribution aspects of land reform, the Constitution states that “a person or community whose tenure of land is insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled to security of tenure which is legally secure or comparable redress” to the extent provided by an act of Parliament.
Addressing restitution, the Constitution reads a person or community dispossessed of property after June 19 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled to either restitution of that property or to equitable redress, to the extent provided by an act of Parliament. The Restitution of Land Rights Act, signed into law in 1994, was to address specific land claims through a land claims commission and land claims court.
The democratic government has passed more than 1,000 laws in terms of the Constitution. Laws from before the democracy must also comply with the Constitution.
The public hearings and roundtables with academics, experts and civil society organisations in particular fields are part of efforts to publicise the panel’s work and to encourage ownership of the task at hand by a range of South Africans. The panel will wrap up its public hearing engagements in March.
It has also invited the public to make written submissions. The cut-off date for these is end March. Submissions may be handed in at public hearings, posted to PO Box 2164, Cape Town 8000 (attention Leanne Morrison) or e-mailed to highlevelpanel@parliament.gov.za.
Have the laws of democracy and their application helped or hindered SA in realising the kind of society envisaged in the Constitution? What are the gaps? Are there too many laws? Are many of them too complicated? Tell the panel. Consultations across the country will shape the final report and its recommendations, for handover to the speakers’ forum in August 2017, when it will also be launched in the media. Urgent problems have come up that need not wait until the report has been completed. They are being passed on to the relevant authorities.
Motlanthe chairs the high-level panel on assessment of key legislation and acceleration of fundamental change.