The property of millions of South Africans – from land, farms and houses to shares, business premises and mining rights – will be at risk of the government succeeds in passing its latest Expropriation Bill, warns the IRR.
The scale of the domestic risk, and of the likely damage to South Africa’s economy and its standing as an investment destination, is spelled out in a new report – Issue Alert: Expropriation Bill, One week left to ‘kill the bill’ – published by the IRR yesterday.
Author of the report, IRR head of policy research Dr Anthea Jeffery, describes the draft law as ‘a draconian measure’ that must be stopped before it can be used to strip millions of South Africans of their homes and other assets without fair procedures or equitable compensation.
Jeffery points out that the Bill does not address ‘the injustices of the past and restore land rights’ – as Deputy President David Mabuza claimed when the draft legislation was gazetted last October; the real import of the Bill is that ‘(all) asset classes are vulnerable, and so too are all South Africans’.
With the 10 February deadline for public comment approaching, South Africans are urged to endorse the IRR’s submission and help ‘to kill this bill and protect property rights for everyone, black or white, rich or poor”.
Jeffery points out that the Bill has ‘enormous ramifications for the 1 million white and 8.7 million black South Africans who own houses, the thousands of black South Africans who have bought more than 6 million hectares of urban and rural land since 1991, and the roughly 17 million people with informal rights to plots held in customary tenure. It also threatens companies, both large and small, with the loss of shares, business premises, mining rights, and other property.’
South Africans have been ‘encouraged to believe that the Bill deals only with land, and primarily with ‘white’ farming land”, but the Bill describes the “property” subject to its provisions as “not limited to land”.
Moreover, while failing to meaningfully address land reform or urban housing needs, the Bill will ‘deprive the Constitution of much of its vital force, leaving people far more vulnerable to the destructive interventions of an increasingly powerful state’.
Over time, the Bill ‘will be used to strip people of their land, homes, business premises, pensions, and other assets – and to vest these in the hands of a powerful political elite intent on pursuing a socialist National Democratic Revolution’.
The draft law ‘does nothing to achieve what most people want: jobs, houses, schools, rising prosperity, individual liberty, and respect for the rule of law’, but will instead ‘scare off investment, weaken and in time destroy businesses, increase unemployment, and stifle the economic recovery the country so badly needs’.
Food security will be eroded, and hunger worsened, and it could ‘help trigger a sovereign debt default (and) set hyperinflation spiralling’.