Will land ever be expropriated from whites?

THE revelation that there are about 7000 land claims dating back to 1998 still outstanding should be a cause for concern for the ANC-led government.

If there are areas where the ruling party has dismally failed, then the land issue is one of them. The party’s seriousness in addressing land claims has been questioned from the outset, when it agreed to a willing buyer, willing seller policy.

This policy meant that landowners, mostly white people who acquired land through violent dispossession from black people of their ancestral land, would have to sell the land to the state only if they wanted to, and the state should be willing to buy.

As a result of white people’s reluctance to release land, the state failed to meet its 2013 deadline, which it had set to have returned 30% of land to its rightful black owners.

It is a shame for the ANC government that, 28 years later, it has not returned even 30% of land to the black people in this country, let alone be left sitting with 7000 land claims for 24 years and failing to resolve them.

Even those lucky enough to have retained ownership of their land of birth through restitution and redistribution are experiencing problems, where land commission officials are accused of registering the wrong people as trustees for their own benefit.

Radical and leftist parties in the country, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, have been questioning the rationale behind a black government’s decision to purchase land from the white settlers who came here by ships and forcefully dispossessed black people of their land of birth.

According to the EFF, which many people resonate with, land should have been expropriated without compensation from the outset, after the ANC took power in 1994.

Many people believed the ANC sold out during Codesa talks in the early 90s for not saying anything about the 1913 Land Act, or rather not repealing this act right away, which preserved the status quo till today with white people owning most of the land.

With pressure from parties like the EFF, the ANC, at its 54th national conference in 2017, agreed to land expropriation without compensation and vowed to speed up the return of land to the original rightful owners – black people – but five years later, not one piece of land we know of has been expropriated.