Hearth and home are the way to do land reform
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, goes the poem. Accused No 1 in a criminal trial was not how Jacob Zuma planned to spend 2018. He would be succeeded as head of the ANC by his former wife and he would have a relaxed passing of state power to her during the year. He’d make genial appearances on Gupta TV, address gala dinners back in KwaZulu-Natal and perhaps get down to writing that book.
Instead, he lost his bet with fate. Cyril Ramaphosa won the ANC leadership against Zuma’s faction in December. In February, Ramaphosa forced him from office and in March, on Friday, the National Prosecuting Authority announced Zuma would be charged with 16 counts of fraud and racketeering.
How clinical is that? Ramaphosa will, I hope, take the time in public one day soon to reflect on his good fortune. These are the same charges the NPA dropped against Zuma so he could become president in 2009. They go back all the way to the old ’90s arms deal and Zuma’s relationship with Schabir Shaik. Not a Gupta charge in sight yet. Those are still to come.
And as he is reflecting, I hope he has the good grace to acknowledge the pivotal role the Democratic Alliance, and in particular its former leader Helen Zille and current federal executive chairman James Selfe, have played in getting these charges reinstated. It is all down to their doggedness, a quality not sufficiently appreciated by the rest of us.
But come back to the moment. It is huge. Cyril has almost cleared the deck. There are a few more heads to roll — including that of Shaun Abrahams, the gutless NPA chief who finally charges Zuma when he no longer has power but who could have reinstated these charges years ago — and then he has nothing but his own demons to confront.
Land will be the big one. Obviously there is lots of alarmist comment doing the rounds following the February vote in parliament to look at ways of including expropriation without compensation into the constitution.
Beat whatever drum you want to. It is crazy to panic, in my view, but equally crazy for the government to tell people not to panic. That makes it worse. Ramaphosa must just make sure the select committee on the constitution gets on with the job. The longer it takes to make a sensible decision, the worse the wait will become.
And he’d better already have a pretty clear idea in his own mind about how this ends.
The constitution will be amended, probably, to allow for expropriation without compensation but the circumstances under which that can happen will need to be forensically detailed and clad with impenetrable defences.
Yes, it’s tense. The Australian home affairs minister has stupidly lumbered into the issue by offering white South African farmers who are being stripped of their land and hunted down like animals easy refuge in his “civilised” country. He does them no good at all.
But for me the most telling comment of all is silence on land from the commanding heights of business. It means the CEOs are giving Ramaphosa a break. He had no option but to let the motion on land run. They get it. It was the price he paid at the December elective conference for beating Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to the ANC leadership.
So yes, in theory, a change to the property clauses in the Bill of Rights could change everything here for the worse. But the DA, despite its opposition to the very idea of expropriation without compensation, must surely know that Singapore overcame its acute colonial housing shortage with forced expropriation of land in the ’60s. Perhaps the party could use post-colonial Singapore as a model when its members on the select committee begin their deliberations.
Expropriation in Singapore was compulsory but some compensation, often well below market rates, was paid. More important, though, today 90% of Singaporean households have title to their homes. In other words, by creating individual title, Singaporeans generated immeasurable wealth in the island.
That’s Ramaphosa’s target. The more titled property he can put into people’s hands, the safer our country will be from revolution and mayhem. Having Jacob Zuma on trial will be amusing and diverting. But it’s already a sort of sideshow. He will mashini wam his way in and out of court but his time is done. He can’t say he wasn’t warned.
Ramaphosa’s real problem is the left of his party and the EFF. The only way to outpace them is to make millions more South Africans part of the real economy. That always starts with your own home.