When property rights crusaders are silent

The problem with people here who fear economic change is not that they take property rights too seriously. It is that they do not take them seriously enough.

Concern for property rights is at the centre of the debate about government plans to expropriate land without compensation. It would be odd if it were not. Rights to property are central to a market economy. Without a secure property right, investment is impossible. But those who stress this are selective. They care deeply about the property rights of some but show no interest in those of others.

In this country’s debate, property rights mean only those people or companies who own property. But individual ownership is not the only way people can establish the right to use property: small farmers in former Bantustan areas can form communal property associations, which give them a right to the land they farm.

Nor are owners the only people with the right to use land or the buildings built on it. Paying rent or working for the owner are two other ways of gaining it. This right may not be as strong as that of the owners, but it remains a right, which is why no-one occupying property in this country can be evicted legally without a court order.

These holders of property rights far outnumber individual owners. Unlike those of owners, their rights do not face a possible future threat — they have been under real threat for years. But the champions of property rights show no interest in their rights at all.

There has been no shortage of attacks on the right of people to use property. Small farmers have been forced to ask courts to protect them from traditional leaders and provincial governments. About 930,000 workers and labour tenants were reportedly evicted from farms in the first 10 years of democracy, and researchers say evictions continue in parts of the country.

And the property right of people living in inner city apartment blocks remains under threat. The current defenders of property rights are silent on these threats.

Perhaps the best example of the debate’s double standard is the silence when, earlier in 2018, Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba, a former chair of the Free Market Foundation, supported expropriation without compensation. No-one seems to have been remotely concerned about property rights, presumably because he was talking about inner city flats, whose residents are people whose right to use property is not considered important.

So property rights are more important than the opponents of change would have us believe. They are vital to the many, not just the few. Failing to recognise this is itself a threat to property rights. As long as they are seen as the rights of the few, protecting them will not seem important to the many or at least to politicians and activists who claim to speak on their behalf. And there is little point in complaining that critics don’t understand how important property rights are to most South Africans if the mainstream debate fails to grasp this too.

None of this means the economy will benefit from weakening property rights. These rights are more likely to flourish and to strengthen the economy if the rights of small farmers, labour tenants, farmworkers and rent-paying flat dwellers are taken every bit as seriously as those of owners and investors.

This calls for a shift in the debate from a sterile exchange on what should happen to the rights of owners to one on how the law can best guarantee the property rights of all, including those whose need for these rights is as great as the owners’.