ANC, EFF land promises ‘blatant lies’
It is highly immoral of the ANC and the EFF to cultivate hope with desperate South Africans that they will one day own land, the DA said on Sunday.
“It is deeply disturbing that the ANC and EFF use the land hearings that are currently taking place across the country to continue to lie to South Africans about owning land,” DA spokesperson Thandeka Mbabama said.
The official opposition would continue to attend these hearings and remind people that the ANC and the EFF’s promises about land ownership “are blatant lies”.
“The truth is simple: the ANC and EFF believe that the state should be the sole owner of land and the people must be tenants on state land.
“This means that South Afri- cans – the very people who attend the land hearings in the desperate hope that they will soon become owners of land – will have no security of tenure. They will be tenants, serving the ANC and its corrupt network,” Mbabama said.
“It is highly immoral of the ANC and EFF to cultivate hope with desperate South Africans that they will one day own land.
“How many of the thousands of people that we have seen attending these hearings over the past weeks truly understand that the ANC and EFF’s proposal to change the constitution to allow the government to expropriate land without compensation will have the exact opposite outcome?”
Millions of South Africans desperately yearned for the dignity that owning land and having a proper roof over their heads would provide. Yet, the ANC and EFF openly continued to peddle their cruel and cynical lie that this would be made possible through amending the constitution, Mbabama said.
The DA believed it was not the constitution that failed the people, it was the ANC. This was confirmed by the panel chaired by former president Kgalema Motlanthe that found that there was evidence “a degree of elite capture has taken place in land reform in general” and that the implementation of restitution under the ANC had been extremely poor.
“We will remind [South Africans] that under a DA government, communal land will be given to those living on it and title deeds will be given to urban housing beneficiaries,” Mbabama said. – ANA