President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent signing into law of the Expropriation Bill got headlines screaming boldly. Discernible in most news coverage was the same old imagination that the expropriation law starts and ends with land reforms in South Africa.
Many should learn that while expropriation of land is the right legislative instrument to provide legal basis for the state to address historical land injustices, it is by no means limited to that purpose.
Dealing with historical land dispossessions is just one among the purposes for which lawmakers place such an instrument in the hands of governments.
Political parties in SA seem to largely seek to align themselves with what they think are the hopes of their constituencies, with regards to land ownership.
This would be the reason parties such as the DA vehemently oppose the aspect of the act that empowers the government to expropriate “without compensation”, ignoring the all-important assurance that expropriation can only be carried out in public interest.
Land ownership has been perennially emotive over the span of our democratic era, because land reform has not been a resounding success, and those in the margins of the economy feel like they have been left in limbo.
Expropriation of property is generally controversial the world over.
Yet, expropriation of land is always necessary for governments to undertake. Controversy over expropriation of land arises everywhere around the globe.
That is because even when it is done for developmental purposes rather than addressing historical problems of involuntary resettlements, it changes property market value in ways that private owners are often not able to know before the projects for which expropriation is carried out are completed.
The new law on expropriation of land will do very little more than the old law could do. The hope among the landless is for the new law to turn the volume up when the right circumstances arise for the government to expropriate land without compensation in public interest.
Such circumstances will be nothing short of exceptional, since the repealed law along with constitutional provisions had already provided government with grounds to determine the value of the land being considered for expropriation.
Part of the government’s failure in the past was sticking to the willingness of the seller to sell without reasoning for public interest.
It is not entirely helpful to look at the new expropriation law through the political lens, which is the common view used in SA when people grapple with expropriation of land.
Even if land reforms were executed spectacularly in SA, to the extent that it satisfied everyone despite their economic and racial background, the government would still need expropriation laws for its developmental agenda.
Expropriation laws are arguably the most common pieces of legislative and legal instruments the world over. All governments require expropriation laws to gain access to private property for development of public infrastructure.
Even the most successful economies boasting drool-inducing public infrastructure acquired land using expropriation laws to give effect to their developmental policies.
Even multilateral organisations have to reckon with expropriation.
The World Bank has an Inspection Panel, founded in 1993 to receive complaints relating to forced relocations and investigate the cases, because governments use expropriation laws to force people to relocate for development projects financed by the World Bank.
Complainants approach the organisation when expropriation was effected without compensation or insufficient compensation.
Most countries worded their expropriation laws carefully, emphasising compensation for violation of individual rights that the laws inevitably commit.
In Europe, governments grapple with these laws both within developmental and historical contexts.
African countries also face this reality as they too have to manage their own developmental agendas. Governments often arrive at positions in which expropriation of land needs to be effected in the public interest.
Rwanda’s legislative wording on expropriation law resembles the common carefulness that most jurisdictions apply, stating that only the government can carry out expropriation of land, and proceeding to warn that “no person can hinder the [expropriation] program”.
Which suggests that in instances where the private owner of the land hopes to resist the intention to expropriate, the government will most certainly prevail, and such resisting private land owner shall be compensated to the tune that the government determines as fair.
The Expropriation Act is unlikely to give land reform the impetus to stride further than it has over the past 30 years though.
• Sydney Seshibedi is a PhD candidate in the department of political sciences and international relations at the University of Pretoria