IRR launches its Right to Own Bill, an alternative to the Expropriation Act

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is launching a new draft law this week as a pro-property rights alternative to the Expropriation Act.

The Right to Own Bill curtails the enormous powers the Expropriation Act gives to the state, while expanding the reach of property rights by a process of granting title deeds to all households with an outstanding claim to land. 

Says Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager: “Secure property rights are key to economic prosperity. Our government has a duty not only to extend these rights to all South Africans but to strengthen rather than weaken them, which is what the Expropriation Act does.” 

The IRR warns that the threat to property rights under the Expropriation Act extends to all property, whether rural or urban, corporeal or incorporeal, formal or informal. Nobody is safe from the reach of the vast powers it grants to possibly hundreds of government entities. 

In contrast, the Right to Own Bill: 

• Repeals conflicting provisions of the Expropriation Act of 2025 and replaces them with market-value compensation;
• Introduces a housing voucher system that low-income households can use to build or upgrade their own homes;
• Mandates formalising township and housing settlements to pave the way for issuing title deeds;
• Provides for redistributing underutilised state land through a transparent, market-driven process;
• Institutes digitising land records and simplifying transactions, and
• Establishes a Special Directorate for the Protection of Property Rights within the National Prosecuting Authority to fight land-related fraud and unlawful occupation. 

This Bill facilitates the development of infrastructure for all South Africans to live in communities with paved roads, electrification and access to piped water for every household. It unlocks access to land and finance where it was once beyond reach for impoverished communities. 

It ends illegal seizures of property through invasions, and shields individuals from the excessive expropriating powers of a rapacious state. It secures the rights to property of all citizens who live in uncertainty about the status of their ownership, and finally ends the decades of limbo. It guarantees that the state pays market-value compensation to all faultless owners who may have all or part of their property expropriated. 

“Unlike the Expropriation Act, the Right to Own Bill widens the net of property rights and protects them from invaders and the state. Property rights are human rights − they should be supported as such rather than risk being gradually eroded,” Maja concludes. 

Media contact: Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager Tel: 079 418 6676 Email: makone@irr.org.za

Media enquiries: Michael Morris Tel: 066 302 1968 Email: michael@irr.org.za