Whites, blacks will all lose their property — DA
The DA confirmed on Monday that an SMS accusing the ANC and the EFF of working together to take all private homes and land was official party communication, while leader Mmusi Maimane branded expropriation without compensation as statesanctioned theft.
Maimane said on Monday that proposed amendments to the Constitution would strip all owners of their property — “white and black South Africans alike would lose everything”.
On the SMS, Portia Adams, Maimane’s spokeswoman, said: “What is alarmist is a proposal to seriously threaten property rights, which are the bedrock of the economy. We have a responsibility to inform South Africans about what is really at stake and to mobilise them to defeat this dangerous constitutional amendment.”
Since Parliament passed a motion paving the way for a review of section 25 of the Constitution to explore the viability of expropriation without compensation, vacant land in Midrand, near Johannesburg, has been occupied.
The constitutional review committee has until August to report back to Parliament about section 25.
The DA would campaign against the proposed amendments, Maimane vowed.
“You can have a growing, thriving economy or you can have expropriation,” he said.
“But you absolutely cannot have both.… We are the party of the protection of all individual rights, cardinal among those the right to security of one’s own property and the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour.
“We regard the attempt to amend the Constitution as nothing but a populist effort to scapegoat the Constitution for the failure of the ANC ... to reform land ownership.”
The DA supported land restitution and redistribution, and efforts to undo the legacy of forced land dispossession.
“Any suggestion that our firm opposition to expropriation without compensation is equivalent to opposing land reform is simply nonsense,” he said.
Ben Cousins of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies said the government had to provide more effective political and policy leadership on land and expropriation without compensation.
“The Bill of Rights in the Constitution has been termed a ‘mandate for social transformation’. In relation [to] the property clause in particular, this does not seek to preserve existing property and power relations. It does prohibit the state from arbitrarily depriving anyone of property, but nonarbitrary deprivation, including by way of expropriation, is allowed.
“In fact, section 25 contains a mandate for the fundamental transformation of property relations, necessary given our history,” said Cousins.
He said expropriation with or without compensation was a means to achieve land redistribution, security of tenure and land restitution, all of which were in the public interest.