MICHAEL MORRIS: Ramaphosa rides into expropriation jeopardy eyes wide shut - BusinessLIVE

Michael Morris
President Cyril Ramaphosa will surely have reinforced rather than allayed anxieties about his government’s draft expropriation law when he acknowledged last week — in curiously unabashed terms — that it could indeed herald “future jeopardy”. 

Who, one wonders, was comforted by his unnerving qualification that, well, “we’ve had past jeopardy on this side of the table”. (Ramaphosa was responding to a question in parliament from Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald, who was concerned about the investment-discouraging consequences of the bill’s expropriation without compensation provisions. The ANC argues — as the president himself put it — that they are a necessary part of a legal instrument that “is critical to addressing a hunger that people have for land”.)  

More about this “hunger” in a minute, but regarding “past jeopardy” there can be no serious argument that Ramaphosa is wrong to say that “[deprivation] of land was central to the disenfranchisement and dispossession of the majority of South Africans”. But to advance deprivation of rights as a principle of transformation is an ironic distortion of what remains SA’s substantially unfulfilled historic task of expanding rights and genuinely transforming “property relations”. 

It is difficult to judge who might be reassured by Ramaphosa’s saying of “past jeopardy” that “some of us lived through it, but we are going to make sure that because we are a constitutional state, [expropriation] is done in terms of our laws and constitution”. 

In fact, as the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has pointed out, the bill “creates an expropriation first, review later system that will expose people to expropriation without compensation and to expropriation below market value as the new normal. By contrast, the bill of rights requires court settlement first and expropriation only thereafter, to comply with guarantees of equitable compensation (section 25), administrative justice (section 33) and access to court (Section 34)”. 

Lack of insight

Of course, just, fair government action is surely the most basic assumption of constitutional governance. It is wholly necessary, and a fundamental promise to citizens (and those investors  Groenewald is far from alone in worrying about).

But for government to pin its hopes of transforming society on being able to take property away from people “in terms of our laws and constitution” reveals a staggering lack of insight into the significance of property rights, and the risk to their status in SA now.

I for one don’t doubt there is a hunger for altered property relations, for want of a better term, but I don’t think it’s “land” in the customary rural sense in which the word is used that many are hungry for. Cities and towns are where the action is (according to Stats SA, by 2021 more than 67.85% of the total population lived in urban areas and cities) and where the need is highest for assets, agency and a chance to stake a claim to real economic participation.  

As the IRR points out in its submission on the Expropriation Bill to the National Council of Provinces, focusing rather on formalising ownership through issuing proper title deeds “would help unlock the full economic value” of houses or plots, and “bring this dead capital to life”.  

Across the globe countries “that have nationalised or expropriated land, mines, banks, oil and other assets without adequate compensation ... are among the poorest in the world”. Where property rights are upheld, everyone is better off. 

This is the choice SA faces. Our “future jeopardy” is precisely trusting that taking property away from people will confer any advantage at all to anyone.  

• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-03-13-michael-morris-ramaphosa-rides-into-expropriation-jeopardy-eyes-wide-shut/