Two weeks ago at NAMPO, Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Dean Macpherson assured the audience that the new Expropriation Act was no cause for alarm. I shared the panel with him, Jaco Kleynhans of Solidariteit, as well as representatives of the two largest farm-lobby groups, AgBiz’s Theo Boshoff and AgriSA’s Willem de Chavonnes Vrugt.
Throughout the discussion the Minister repeated soothing but inaccurate talking points. My objections were dismissed as fearmongering.
Macpherson’s ignorant or dishonest reading of the Act’s text was striking, but more striking still was the way the two agribusiness bodies either nodded along or kept silent while the Minister trivialised a law that is badly drafted, contradictory, and intensely dangerous.
If one reads it clinically and with textual accuracy, the Expropriation Act empowers more than 400 expropriating authorities in South Africa to seize property for an open-ended list of public-interest purposes, either at below market value or for nothing at all.
Secure title is the bedrock of competitive farming: it makes land bankable, unlocks credit, allows family farms to continue, and gives newcomers a chance to compete. Remove that foundation and capital dries up, markets consolidate around a handful of giants, smaller producers are suffocated. Yet, given the opportunity to point out the gross failures of the Act, AgriSA and AgBiz, bodies meant to defend the entire agricultural sector, particularly its most vulnerable members, simply chose not to. Instead, they placated and demurred, assuring the audience that the Act could be managed.
On the long drive home, I mulled over what I had seen. A Minister diverging from his party’s manifesto can perhaps be explained by political scheming. But the stunningly weak position on the Expropriation Act taken by AgriSA and AgBiz was a bit harder to understand. I revisited the IRR’s record on the issue, spoke to farmers, and re-read old statements.
A pattern emerged: a Big Agri Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC) Playbook, as it were.
First, they placate and reassure when alarm is the rational response. When President Ramaphosa signed the Act in January, Boshoff issued an AgBiz memo, astonishingly claiming that the law does not water down property rights. A week later AgBiz economist Wandile Sihlobo wrote in the Mail and Guardian that agriculture was on solid ground and there was no need to panic.
Grossly understated
Boshoff’s 29 January note, entitled “Expropriation Act – Separating Fact from Fiction”, grossly understated the statute’s reach and the vulnerability it imposes on owners. He claims expropriation is a last resort, because the state must first make a reasonable offer. In reality, an authority need only give thirty days’ notice, consider objections, and it is then free to proceed at its own discretion. No court checks whether the offer was reasonable before ownership shifts.
Boshoff also suggests that expropriating procedures are more onerous for the state than a normal purchase, implying that the state would prefer purchase over expropriation. Yet the Act lets the state seize an asset without substantive negotiations, pay below market value, delay payment, and foist costly litigation on the owners afterwards if they are dissatisfied by the state’s unilateral offer. Most astonishingly, he calls EWC compensation an “academic possibility”.
AgBiz’s head of legal intelligence, Annelize Crosby, wrote on 12 February 2025 that the Act “is a procedural piece of legislation that does not grant any new powers of expropriation” – a gross misreading of the law’s text. She erroneously claims further that the “Act also protects rights not only of property owners but also of unregistered rights owners.”
When the main farm lobbies say everything is under control, many farmers who lack the time or legal expertise to scrutinise legislation fairly assume they need not worry. Given the real threats to the law in the text, whatever spin Minister Macpherson or his allies in Big Agri want to put on it, such complacency in the face of a dangerous law is inexcusable.
The Act contains numerous alarming elements that were ignored by Boshoff and De Chavonnes Vrugt on stage at NAMPO. They allowed Macpherson’s distortions, or added to them, on at least two crucial issues.
Neutralises judicial protections
They claimed the Act protects property through the courts. In fact, the Act effectively neutralises judicial protections. The state can take ownership the day after issuing an expropriation notice; compensation is arguable in court only afterwards, with the owner carrying the burden of proof and the legal costs.
They claimed the Act brings clarity and certainty. In truth it creates expansive and sinisterly vague and endless grounds for nil compensation in the ‘public interest’, meaning that any one of the 400+ expropriating authorities needs merely to argue that something falls under the undefined heading of ‘public interest’, and it can proceed to expropriate land without compensation. A government desperate for revenue, or anxious to reward cronies, will predicably abuse this legal allowance concept to the breaking point.
Reassurance where resistance is needed is step one of the Playbook. Step two, when criticism cannot be avoided, is to shrink the fight to nebulous clerical points.
De Chavonnes Vrugt summarised AgriSA’s objections in only two points: the definition of expropriation and section 12(3) on nil compensation. Nothing about the sidelining of courts, the infinite scope of public interest, or the chilling effect on collateral values that cripples smaller farms. To the extent that AgriSA opposes the most extreme attack on property rights in decades, it does so, by its own admission, on two justified technicalities, but nothing else.
Step three is to shield entrenched players. Former AgriSA president Dan Kriek said in 2019 that if the 20% of farmers who produce 80% of the food were protected from EWC, “progress” could be faster on the entire issue of EWC. Nothing suggests this stance has changed.
Step four, when confronted, is evasive and stubborn silence. In January 2020 the IRR launched an open-letter campaign highlighting AgBiz’s support for the 2019 presidential panel report endorsing EWC. AgBiz’s then-CEO, John Purchase, brushed it off. Yet a chronological review shows the lobby aligning with the pro-EWC narrative at crucial moments.
Party politics
After President Ramaphosa’s December 2017 announcement that the ANC would pursue a constitutional amendment, AgBiz voiced concern, but dismissed the proposal as party politics, not as government policy. It also seized on the President’s proviso that EWC must not harm food security, portraying this as a guarantee when it was obviously a political fig leaf. Later, Big Agri secured seats on the 2018 land-reform panel; Sihlobo, once a critic, co-signed the majority report recommending nil compensation across a wide range of assets, including “under-utilised” land and farm-equity schemes. AgBiz hailed the report as progress and, in parliamentary submissions, urged the abandonment of “slavish adherence to market-driven compensation models” – what normal people might call “just and equitable compensation”.
Farming in South Africa is difficult enough without farm attacks. Farmers face volatile weather, shifting prices, rising input costs, and the threats of crime. They should not also shoulder the risk that their land, often their single greatest asset, can be seized tomorrow for a political slogan labelled “public interest”.
The tragedy is that South Africa’s most influential agribusiness bodies, entrusted to defend the sector, have not merely declined to fight the danger but have attempted cynically to belittle justified public alarm. I was on the stage with them when they had the perfect opportunity to speak truth to power and stand up for the interests of every farmer in South Africa. They chose not to.
Why would they do this?
I’m afraid there lurks a cynical and sinister motive in the quiet complacency of Big Agri on EWC. After all, it does make some commercial sense for Big Agri to allow land to depreciate as collateral. The large agribusinesses are able to provide other forms of collateral like capital flow. If an experienced farmer with a background in policy is to be believed, an industry-wide shift away from land as financing security is already happening.
The effect of this is to suffocate smaller farmers whose only real asset is the land they own – for now. This inevitably leads to a decline in the number of smaller producers, allowing Big Agri to occupy the market space uncontested. It’s the truth Dan Kriek let slip in 2019 when he named AgriSA’s price for selling out. By allowing EWC to proceed, Big Agri lets the law deal with those pesky emerging farmers and family farms.
Farming is hard enough without the law tilting the table. Farmers should not also face the risk that their single greatest asset can be confiscated tomorrow in the name of an undefined public interest.
Unbelievably complacent
Yet that is the risk the Expropriation Act creates. South Africa’s most influential agribusiness bodies have not merely been unbelievably complacent in fighting this danger; they have tried to tranquilise their members.
By reassuring when they should be warning, minimising the threat when they should be exposing it, and placing entrenched interests above those of the farmers who are the heart of the sector, AgriSA and AgBiz are grossly and inexcusably abdicating their responsibility.
[Image: By South African Tourism from South Africa – Die Mas vineyard, Wine Route, Upington, Northern Cape, South Africa, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67613282]
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