Many South Africans were startled last week to hear the Democratic Alliance’s minister of public works and infrastructure, Dean Macpherson, defend the ANC’s Expropriation Act in comments that conflict with years of DA warnings about expropriation without compensation, and threaten the credibility of the party’s court challenge.
Macpherson’s argument begins with a fundamental mistake. He repeatedly justifies nil-compensation expropriation by citing the need for land to build transmission lines and other infrastructure. That sort of taking is expropriation for a public purpose.
Yet the clause that permits the state to pay nothing, section 12(3), applies only to expropriation in the public interest, a far broader and deliberately vague notion. Public interest is elastic enough to include ideological projects such as race-based land reform and demands for racially representative ownership patterns.
By conflating these two terms Macpherson either shows alarming ignorance of the statute he administers or seeks to mislead South Africans about its reach.
Once that error is exposed the scale of the threat becomes clear. More than four hundred organs of state are empowered to seize any form of property, not only land, whenever they can frame the seizure as serving the public interest. Because the Act offers an open-ended list of nil-compensation grounds, officials receive a blank cheque to confiscate homes, businesses, shares, or savings. In a country with a long record of arbitrary state power, the potential for abuse is obvious.
To soften that danger the minister insists that regulations issued under the Act will keep officials in check. This view is naïve. Regulations are subordinate rules that any future minister can rewrite overnight, so they cannot cure defects in the primary legislation. Entrusting constitutional guarantees to the goodwill of tomorrow’s bureaucrats instead of insisting on tightly drafted law exposes every owner to new political risk.
Late and costly remedy
The minister then invokes the courts as a safeguard, yet the Act itself sidelines them. The state can take ownership the day after issuing a notice of expropriation, with no court hearing in advance. Only disputes over compensation reach a judge, and they do so after the owner has lost possession, income, and security. The burden of proof falls on that dispossessed citizen, who must fund litigation to recover what was taken. Far from providing robust protection, the courts are reduced to being a late and costly remedy.
Macpherson tries another line of defence by warning about speculative land profiteers who exploit insider information. This rhetorical straw man paints honest owners, such as pensioners, smallholders, township homeowners, and emerging black entrepreneurs, as potential crooks. By smearing the many to pursue the few he corrodes the principle that every citizen’s property deserves equal protection.
Perhaps most damaging is the minister’s soothing tone. By claiming the law is manageable and fixable he blunts public urgency at the very moment a determined campaign is needed to support litigation and drive repeal. His message lends weight to the ANC’s claim that critics misunderstand the Act rather than recognising its malign design.
Nothing in Macpherson’s defence aligns with official DA policy, which commits the party to litigate for the Act’s invalidation, to oppose expropriation without compensation in any guise, and to promote growth through secure property rights.
Mischaracterising the law
By mischaracterising the law and minimising its risks the minister undermines those commitments. This is no minor communications lapse; it is a dereliction of duty to his office, his party, and the millions who rely on the DA to defend their constitutional rights.
Macpherson must retract his statements and return to the DA’s principled stance, or he must resign. The stakes, for both the party’s credibility and the security of every South African who values ownership, could not be higher.
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