That the National Assembly has moved to re-establish the ad hoc committee to amend section 25 of the constitution shows that, despite a global pandemic that guarantees nothing will be the same again, a dangerous and determined continuity runs through our politics.
That it hopes to finalise the amendment by the end of the year is a firm and unfortunate response to those who argued a few months back that the present crisis would finally see reformist impulses released. It has not.
SA should be under no illusions about what this portends. Earlier this year the ANC decided that it would push for an altogether more intrusive change to the constitution. Not content with merely “making explicit that which is implicit”, it wished to shift decisions on compensation out of the hands of the courts to those of the executive.
South Africans from all quarters — in business, farming, ordinary people concerned about their own aspirations — must take note and decide how to respond to this.
There is a great deal at stake. Expropriation without compensation has already imposed costs on the economy in terms of the uncertainty it has created. The determination to push ahead with it, in the face of the battering from a public health emergency and the lockdown of the economy, could well see SA forfeiting the opportunity to join its peer countries in a post-pandemic recovery.
Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations
