Two bills recently rammed through Parliament will benefit traditional and political leaders, not the poorest and most vulnerable in the country
It also provides traditional leaders with punitive and coercive powers over community members who challenge their authority to sign away people’s land rights. Issuing strong encouragement to traditional leaders to be the central players in rural economic opportunities, the president included a single line that paid heed to the rights of ordinary people – custodianship, he said, should “be balanced against the constitutional right of individuals”.
In his recent speech, the president exhorted traditional leaders to encourage their subjects to vote.But will it deliver the rural vote to the ANC? Not if the 2016 election results are anything to go by. The October Constitutional Court judgment of Maledu and Others v Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources confirms that, where the holders of informal land rights are threated with deprivation of their rights, they must either consent or their rights must be expropriated.The earlier Traditional Leadership Bill seeks to override the Constitutional Court’s Maledu judgment requiring the consent of those directly affected.
Unless, of course, the implementation of “expropriation without compensation” is used to remove the residual property rights of the most marginalised black South Africans.There is scant capacity in the department of rural development and land reform to expropriate white-owned property. An effort to amend the original Restitution Bill of 1994 to make this possible was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2016.How does this accord with statements about radical land reform and access to land for redistribution through expropriation without compensation?
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