It’s still a long walk to land expropiation

As the commission on land and the economy completed its report to last weekend’s ANC lekgotla, President Cyril Ramaphosa told his gathered comrades that the party was losing the moment in the parliamentary hearings on land. The two-month-long, countrywide hearings had opened up the floodgates of significant black pain: about land, about housing and about finding a way out of bone-crushing poverty. The term “expropriation” had been weaponised into an instrument of promise and of fear, and a middle road was no longer possible. The young EFF had commandeered the hearings and the old ANC had been found wanting, the lekgotla heard. The party did not have a plan at the hearings and so it was clear to Ramaphosa that he had to do something.

A few nights later, on Tuesday, he took the extraordinary step of making a national TV address in party regalia to tell the country that the governing party had decided a constitutional amendment would be passed to make explicit the right to expropriate without compensation.

Ramaphosa sought to kill two birds with one stone. First, he had to show the party’s rank and file that it had heard the pain of the people who had made representations and who believe that a constitutional amendment will be the cure. Second, he has to end an eight-month tussle with a faction in his party that is using expropriation without compensation as a battering ram to build a narrative that he has failed to implement two key resolutions from the party’s Nasrec conference in December: a constitutional amendment to effect expropriation without compensation and another about the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank, which is about buying out minority private shareholders who have no voting or other power at the Bank.

Will Ramaphosa’s gambit work? He needs the constitutional amendment to buy himself time to take the ANC to a significant victory in next year’s election, after which he will have two clean terms to be his own man. Now, the rival faction is strong and well-oiled.

And how will this happen? The ANC will withdraw the

Expropriation Bill from parliament and amend it to make explicit those categories of land likely to be expropriated without compensation and under what conditions this may happen. These could be abandoned buildings, unused land, unproductive commercial property held for speculative purposes, underutilised state property, and land farmed by labour tenants with an absentee titleholder.

Two sections of the constitution will need to be amended — 25 and 31, the former being the property clause that allows for expropriation and the latter the limitations clause that outlines when rights, to, for example, property, can be limited. The party needs a two-thirds majority in parliament and for six of the nine provinces to pass the amendment. The ANC does not hold a two-thirds majority, but with the support of the EFF and other parties, it can swing it.

The party wants to table the amendment before year-end. Asked if the ANC announcement made moot the parliamentary hearings, committee co-chair Vincent Smith said all parties had already pronounced on where they stood. His committee concluded its hearings in Citrusdal in the Western Cape this week and it has the rest of August to write its report. Is it a foregone conclusion, I asked him. Not at all, said Smith. He said the parliamentary committee he chaired had a record of not rubberstamping the ANC position.

I’ll keep an eye out for what his committee finds and what a formal constitutional amendment on expropriation without compensation will look like. ANC leaders say the regulation will have a light touch and won’t open up a land grab.

Ramaphosa sought to show the party’s rank and file it had heard the pain of the people