“No, be afraid. Be very afraid.” These famous words come from the 1986 sci-fi film, The Fly. A crazy scientist invents a machine that can break matter down, transmit it and then reconstruct it in a similar machine some distance away. He gets into the machine to transmit himself but doesn’t notice a fly with him in the machine.
The DNA of fly and man merge, and the scientist gradually turns into a monster. He is trying to persuade an innocent girl to get into the machine with him. He says, “Don’t be afraid.” But then his girlfriend, who knows better, enters the room, and speaks those words. They could be spoken about the 2025 Expropriation Act – especially after reassuring words from politicians, editors, commentators and businessmen, all saying, “Don’t be afraid.” They can’t have read the Act.
Please read the Act for yourself. It makes it clear that any private property can be expropriated without compensation for any reason the confiscating authority dreams up. Seach the Act for “nil compensation”. It comes up three times, once in the preamble and twice in Chapter 5, 12, (3). Expropriation without compensation requires only that it should be “in the public interest”, and this could mean anything they want it to mean.
Robert Mugabe would have said that his seizure of the private farms was “in the public interest”. A communist would say all private property must be abolished and therefore the expropriation of any private property was “in the public interest”. The Act gives examples of expropriation without compensation but makes it clear it is not limited to these cases. It is unlimited.
There are no safeguards at all. Surely, though, the ANC would never do such a thing? Well, judging by their history, words and deeds, and those of their coalition partners, the SACP and COSATU, and the countries they admire, such as Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela and Cuba, they might well do such a thing. The ANC has already ended private ownership of minerals and water.
President Trump has given an enormous boost to the Expropriation Act by talking ill-informed nonsense in response to it, nonsense almost certainly emanating from Elon Musk. Trump, who seldom bothers to get his facts right, first said, “SA is confiscating land’, and that “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly”. He later said that white farmers were having their lands seized, which they weren’t.
This was a godsend to the ANC and to Trump’s Democrat detractors. Trump seemed to be suggesting that the intention of the Expropriation Act is to take property from rich whites and give it to poor blacks. In other words, its intention is “restitution”, “to correct the racial imbalances of the past” and give back to blacks the land that whites had stolen from them. In reality, the intention of the Act is nothing of the kind. It is to take private property from everyone, black and white, and give it to the ruling party elite, as happened in Zimbabwe.
The main victims of the Act will be poor blacks, who are also the main victims of BEE, affirmative action, cadre deployment and employment equity. But the world’s mainstream media (MSM) and the Democrat politicians don’t see it that way. They see the Act as overcoming the legacy of apartheid, and anyone who opposes it as wanting to restore apartheid. That’s the way the ANC wants them to see it. In the same week, Trump announced his mad scheme to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza and relocate them in neighbouring Arab countries (all of which hate the Palestinians and want nothing to do with them). Trump’s Gaza nonsense and his wrong objections to the Expropriation Act are being blurred together by the media, suggesting that if you object to the Act, you’re probably the sort of mad racist who wants to occupy Gaza.
Trump’s intervention will also promote the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), which is the founding philosophy of the ANC and the SACP. The NDR comes in two phases: first, liberal democracy, which has already taken place; then full-on socialism (communism). In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx summed up socialism: “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Naturally the SACP agrees, and so does the EFF, which proclaims itself to be a Leninist-Marxist Party. The EFF is pleased with the Expropriation Act and says it would now be happy to work with the ANC in GNU, provided the DA were kicked out.
The DA has performed badly in recent weeks and lost a lot of credibility. As a life-long supporter of the DA and its predecessors, I am very disappointed. In the GNU, it has caved in to the ANC on BELA, NHI and the Expropriation Act. Ramaphosa signed off the Act without even informing the DA; the first thing Steenhuisen heard about it was on social media. It was an obviously contemptuous gesture by Ramaphosa, to which the DA meekly submitted. I heard a liberal commentator say the DA was becoming “the ANC’s doormat”.
On 3 February, Steenhuisen was reported as saying that it was not true that the Act allowed land to be seized arbitrarily. “…and it does require fair compensation for legitimate expropriations in terms of Section 25 of the Constitution. It is unfortunate that individuals have sought to portray this Act as an amendment to Section 25 of the Constitution to allow for Expropriation Without Compensation.” But this is exactly what the Act does allow, as I have shown above. Dean Macpherson, the DA Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, echoed this false reassurance. But then on 5 February, the DA changed its mind and said that the Act actually did allow for expropriation with nil compensation and would fight against it “to the bitter end”. It listed rather feeble actions in this bitter fight but did not include pulling out of the GNU, which I now favour.
If it did, the fear would be a “doomsday coalition” of the ANC, EFF and MK. But what would it do, that Ramaphosa has not already done or is proposing to do? Nationalising the Reserve Bank would be purely symbolic since it is already in effect controlled by the government. Spooking foreign investors? They’re already spooked, which is why investment in South Africa is drying up. In the IRR, more sober voices than mine say that the DA in the GNU has certain day-to-day advantages and that the DA are better at running things than the ANC, and are providing more honest and efficient administration. That is no doubt true, but I think the disadvantages of the DA’s remaining outweigh these advantages.
The prosperity of a country depends on private property. Countries without private property always end up with mass poverty for most of the people and immense riches for a tiny communist elite, which is the main reason South African socialists want to abolish it. Another reason, to do with the snobbish, condescending nature of socialism, is that socialists believe the working classes are not entitled to own their own houses.
In England, Labour governments wanted the workers to live in subsidised rented council houses and then be jolly grateful to their socialist masters. When Margaret Thatcher privatised property and let the workers own their own houses, the Labour elite was horrified. In South Africa, the ANC elite has a similar horror of black workers having title deeds to their own houses, and in practice makes it as difficult as possible for them to obtain them.
Ramaphosa’s reasons for signing BELA, NHI and the Expropriation Act are political survival. He was shocked by the ANC’s performance under his leadership in the election of May 2024 when its share of the votes slumped to 40% of the total. To stay in power, he had to rule in some coalition and he chose the DA as his partner. The coalition was called the GNU. He was well aware that his radical, socialist opponents in the RET wing of the ANC, and in the SACP, the EFF, thought he was selling out (to counter-revolutionaries, racists, right-wingers, white monopoly capitalists, imperialists and that sort of thing). He knew that banning Afrikaans, nationalising all healthcare, seizing private property, and taking away power from parents and school governing bodies and giving it over to ANC politicians and SADTU would make him popular with them. He had watched carefully the example in Zimbabwe.
In Zimbabwe, from 1980 to 2000, Robert Mugabe was regarded as a prince of conciliation and peaceful negotiation. (What about his deliberate slaughter of over 20,000 Ndebele in Operation Gukurahundi? Oh, apart from that – which excited no one since he was black and so were his victims.) Then Mugabe’s corruption and mismanagement began to harm the economy, and his radical allies began to grow restless. He lost his referendum in 2000.
To win over his radicals, who mattered since they controlled the armed forces, he set about seizing the private farms, many of which were white-owned, without compensation. Fewer than 20 white farmers were murdered, but about 780,000 black farm workers and their families were kicked off the farms into destitution and hopelessness. The economy collapsed, the black working classes starved but Mugabe’s cronies, the members of his politbureau, became fabulously rich. It was said that revolutionary Comrade Grace Mugabe got ten farms – all in the public interest, of course.
The ANC were ecstatic about this. They thought it was wonderful. Every time Mugabe visited ANC conferences in South Africa, he got a standing ovation. Foreign correspondents and investors took heed, and no doubt so did Elon Musk, then 29. ANC leaders since, from Mbeki to Ramaphosa, proceeded to grovel before Mugabe and help him terrorise the black people of Zimbabwe and stay in power. Ramaphosa now grovels before Mnangagwa, who overthrew Mugabe in a coup in 2017. Ramaphosa is all too aware that if he follows Mugabe’s example, he will immediately become a hero among his radicals, who are hungry for the riches Mugabe’s radicals got. The Expropriation Act will demonstrate to them that he is paving the way for such seizures of private property even though there is no timetable for it. His contemptuous handling of the DA in GNU will demonstrate the same thing.
Ramaphosa has demonstrated to the world and the country that he is a coward and a liar. In his vacuous SONA speech last week, he declared “We will not be bullied.” This was a few days after China had bullied him into removing the Taiwanese embassy from Pretoria – which has been noticed in the USA senate. The ANC was also bullied into refusing entry to the Dalai Lama in 2011. What does Ramaphosa say about China’s brutal occupation of Tibet and savage oppression of Uyghur Moslems? Nothing, of course. He is as brave as a lion in condemning Israel, simply because he joins the chanting international mob, but never takes a stand alone against brutal African tyrants such as Bashir in Sudan, who slaughtered 300,000 poor black people.
Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders are also as brave as lions in attacking the West, especially the USA, believing that Western leaders are so woke and ashamed of their past that they will continue to pour aid and trade into South Africa no matter how much they are abused. That was true up to now.
Now, Trump, a loud-mouthed, often badly-informed bully, but a patriot, not at all ashamed of America’s past, in fact proud of it, will retaliate against ANC attacks with the menacing acts of not giving South Africa as much aid and favourable trade as before. His Secretary of State has already indicated that the USA will not be attending the G20 summit in South Africa this month. AGOA is under threat.
On 26 September 2018, on Bloomberg, an international media house, President Ramaphosa responded to a tweet from President Trump about South African farm murders. He stated to the world, “And whoever gave him that information was completely wrong. There are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.” By that time, the South African Police had recorded over 1,700 farm murders. Such blatant lying before a world audience suggests an almost paranoid departure from the truth. If he can lie about facts that can easily be checked, how much can he lie about his promises and intentions?
I wonder how quickly South Africa could fall into complete collapse. We have been hearing for years that our terrible poverty and unemployment present a “ticking time bomb”, which could explode any time. That’s wrong. Revolutions are never started by very poor people; they haven’t the opportunity to do so; they are too busy surviving. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Communist coup of October 1917 were not led by poor people, let alone working-class people.
Violent uprisings are always led by discontented, ambitious members of the bourgeoisie, often professional revolutionaries, when the circumstances are right. The riots of July 2021 in KZN and Gauteng might have been instigated by the extremely rich Zuma family. The behaviour of Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile, certainly suggests so. President Ramaphosa was utterly unable to contain the rioting. As the South African economy and public services disintegrate, it is possible to imagine far worse riots, amounting to revolution, a revolution led by the rich radical factions demanding abolition of all private property (except their own), brandishing the Expropriation Act as justification.
Meanwhile, I wish Donald Trump would get his facts right and stop offering crazy plans, such as over Gaza. I wish he would listen for once, and learn something and get proper information. He is the greatest embarrassment to me when he does something with which I strongly agree, such as when he pulled out of the anti-science Paris Climate Accord, but for the wrong reasons; he didn’t bother to learn some simple climate science, which he could have done from his excellent scientific advisers.
I wish Elon Musk would convert a fraction of his technical brilliance into political skill, instead of blundering about, getting his facts quite wrong, doing harm to just causes he tries to promote. He has done wrong to his cause: trying to warn people of the very real dangers of the Expropriation Act 2025. Despite Trump and Musk, we should be afraid of this Act, very afraid.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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