Have your say on land expropriation

SOUTH Africans will from next week have the opportunity to voice their views on whether the constitution should be amended to allow land expropriation without compensation.

Yesterday, parliamentarians were unanimous that they would facilitate the public hearings and allow the public to raise their views.

“We expect South Africans to allow dissenting views from either side to raise their views,” co-chairperson Vincent Smith said.

The Constitutional Review Committee met to look at final preparations before they crisscross the country.

Smith said no written submissions would be allowed during the nationwide hearings.

“Don’t come with your truckloads of written submissions to the venue. We simply will not accept,” he said.

The committee resolved to give speakers five to 10 minutes speaking time and to stick to their mandate of looking at desirability to amend the section 25 of the constitution.

“We will not allow any single individual to dominate the proceedings,” Smith said.

The EFF urged Parliament to consider live streaming the public hearings to encourage national discourse so that everyone else got involved.

“Let South Africans speak, let’s engage on the question of land,” EFF chief whip Floyd Shivambu said.

Parliamentarians were urged not to push their party lines at the public hearings, and to stick to their mandate.

“We will come back and have our own debates here. Ours is really to facilitate and not us get involved,” Smith said.

Shivambu concurred with Smith’s sentiment, saying their role was to listen.

“I don’t think we should create a circus to look smarter than the other political party in front of members of the community,” he stated.

Co- chairman Lewis Nzimande emphasised that the public hearings were not a referendum. “Whether you bring 10 000 voices they carry almost the same impact as one voice,” he said in reference to groups mobilising to flood the halls where public hearings will be held.

The parliamentary legal service has also been asked to look into legal processes around the public hearings.

This after Shivambu said they should be satisfied that they followed procedures in terms of complying with the constitution.

“Let us be water-tight with legalities so that we don’t fall into a trap in terms of delaying this process with legal challenges,” he said.

Nzimande, however, said the public hearings were aimed to ascertain the desirability to amend the constitution.

“There is no determination by the committee until all processes are conducted. A desirability will inform the next process after reporting to Parliament,” Nzimande said.

Meanwhile, the committee has received more than 500 000 written submissions, which will be captured by a service provider that will prepare a report for consideration by the committee in August.

Shivambu said the service provider should watch out for anonymous submissions that could have been computer-generated.

“There is a deliberate attempt to filibuster the whole process with the intention of frustrating it.

“We must be aware of that attempt,” he said before warning “right-wing and reactionary forces” wanting to defeat the land question.

But, the ACDP’s Steve Swart said every person was entitled to make a submission so long it could be linked to a name and e-mail.

“It is about the quality of submission. Each submission must be given its proper weight,” Swart said.