Webinar: Rural property holders’ rights deprived in latest legislative blow

The latest legislative blow against property rights compels hundreds of thousands of property owners across rural South Africa to get “consent” from a state official before they can lease or sell their land.

South African property rights have faced a series of major assaults since 2017, but the latest – enacted in the Communal Property Association (CPA) Amendment Act, which was signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in October – is a singular defeat for 470,000 rural landowners.

According to the new law, CPA landowners cannot lease or sell their land without first gaining “consent” from a state “Registrar” by proving that it is in the landowners’ own interest to sell their own land.

The law and its ramifications are examined in the latest report from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), Property Rights Deprived at Agricultural CPAs. The paper will be launched on Tuesday at a webinar in which author of the report, IRR Fellow Gabriel Crouse, will discuss its contents with project and publications manager Terence Corrigan.

The IRR points out that the CPA Amendment Act is directly harmful to CPA landowners, who are reported to own over 2 million hectares of land across rural South Africa. For example, the new “consent” requirement threatens to delay the renewal of leases past plan-to-plant windows, which in turn could cause the proposed lease to collapse and result in no farming being undertaken for the season. This would amount to expropriation without compensation (EWC) of the use-rights on a particular CPA property for a season.

Second, the absurd precedent set by the “consent” requirement is that every landowner in South Africa could be prohibited by Parliament from selling their property, or leasing it out, because a government official believed that the owner would be better off refusing the sale instead. The principle of a voluntary contract between consenting adults that does no harm to third parties would thereby be nullified as the basis of property rights.

Crouse observes: “When anyone wants to sell their house, or factory, or office space, they typically need to pay transfer duties, show that the structure is safe, represent encumbrances and associated debts and so on. That is already a lot of work. Imagine if you also had to prove to a bureaucrat that it was really in your interest to sell or lease your own property and that if she, or he, was not convinced (perhaps by a bribe) then they could cancel the lease or sale. Nearly half a million people are now legally in that position, and the department they must get consent from has arguably the single worst record of delay, corruption and incompetence of all.”

If the CPA Amendment precedent is legally accepted then a regime of “prescribed assets” – where the state forces pension funds, insurers, banks and other major investors to hold designated assets – will be one step closer to commanding the economy. Once 470,000 rural landowners are deprived of the property right to decide what to do with their own possessions, all South Africans are exposed.

Crouse concludes: “The CPA system is already a disaster for many families that were forcibly dispossessed by the apartheid state. The CPA Amendment has made their situation worse. Given time the ricochet will penetrate big city financial centres, and their customers.”

Date: 03 December 2024

Time: 10h00

Participants: Author of the report Gabriel Crouse and IRR project and publications manager Terence Corrigan

Join: https://streamyard.com/watch/PzyYZzyqQfHQ

Media contact: Gabriel Crouse, IRR Fellow Tel: 082 510 0360 Email: gabriel@irr.org.za

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