Tag: Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC)

Finance minister Tito Mboweni’s new economic strategy paper is a refreshing, much needed breath of fresh air for an economy struggling for oxygen. The paper is replete with common sense proposals all aimed at achieving the economic growth South Africa desperately needs. We have been stumbling along a low-growth path of high taxes, kilometres of red-tape, wealth redistribution, and anti-individualism for far too long. If Mboweni’s paper can be taken as a true step in a new direction, a direction of more individual freedom, South Africa will see green shoots of recovery almost immediately.

The latest GDP numbers show that the South African economy declined by 3.2% for the first quarter of 2019. This comes after President Ramaphosa announced a R50 billion stimulus package in September 2018. Since that stimulus followed on a decade of stimulus spending instituted since the 2008 global economic crisis, we must now ask whether Minister Pravin Gordhan’s decision to choose stimulus over austerity was the right one.

It is an unmitigated moral tragedy that in the year of celebrating what would have been Mandela’s 101st birthday, the incumbent government has betrayed him on an issue about which that he felt strongly. This is the resolution by parliament to make it constitutionally permissible to expropriate land without compensation (EWC). Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the resolution does not exempt anyone, not any racial group or entity.

Removing the right to compensation when expropriating property that is currently contained in section 25 of the Constitution, will be a lethal blow to the legitimacy and stability of our constitutional order if done under present conditions.

Hot on the heels of President Ramaphosa telling the European Parliament on 14 November  that South African land reforms will be enacted in adherence to the country’s Constitution, the joint constitutional review committee formally recommended that section 25 of the Constitution be amended to allow for expropriation of land without compensation.

It is a well-known fact that the ANC sees itself not primarily as a ruling party, but rather as a movement. This means that it needs to justify its continued existence in terms of the attainment of the objectives given at the organisation’s founding. The need to do this is what informs former President Thabo Mbeki’s critique of the Expropriation Without Compensation policy (EWC) through the 'leak' of his foundation’s memo.

In the Land Bank’s 2018 Annual Report released earlier this week, the top risk on a list of 18 principal risks is unsurprisingly the issue of land reform and the impact of the possibility of Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC). 

The whole of South Africa is still in shock after the South African Reserve Bank has announced that SA is in a technical recession following two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Most analysts had expected a moderate increase in GDP.

Land dispossession was commonplace in pre-democratic South Africa. People were kicked off their land because past regimes had no regard for individual property rights.