The Expropriation Bill recently became an Act of the South African state, replacing an apartheid-era law adopted fifty years ago (in 1975). In every sense, this Expropriation Act matches South Africa’s anti-working class Constitution drafted under the auspices of imperialism and behind the backs of the oppressed and exploited majority. The new law’s protracted and elite-dominated journey through the judicial labyrinth is a precursor to how it might be used in practice (if at all!) in years to come.
The Expropriation Act aligns with the Property Clause (Section 25) in the 1996 Constitution. Both legal instruments in effect concentrate property ownership (including farmland) among a shrinking number of the wealthiest capitalists. With this new law, the assaults on the agrarian demands and aspirations of the landless peasantry and working class reach new heights of savage brutality.
The act is rooted in capitalist property law. Capitalist legal rules, myths and rhetoric dictate when an expropriating authority (a state entity) can confiscate a property for so-called public purpose or in the public interests (mainly land reform). Moreover, this expropriating authority cannot confiscate a property outside the ‘rule of law’, which is bourgeois-speak for guarding its ‘property’ with the armed might of its state. Media publicity about government of national unity (GNU) feuds of how high or low compensation for the owner of the expropriated property should be, is a diversion into the same capitalist legalese. The same applies to the noise around zero compensation.
Politically astute capitalists and their apologists understand that the 2024 Expropriation Act poses no threat to private landownership or the buying and selling of land in property markets. In other words, instead of disrupting or dismantling capitalist production and social relations on the land, this law fortifies historical and ongoing land theft. Land confiscation confronts landless and poor peasants daily through relentless attacks by glorified tribal despots, loan sharks and giant capitalists in control of land, food and financial markets.
Historically, the demand to expropriate and nationalise land to resolve agrarian injustices and inequalities occupied a foundational position in the programmes of South African liberation movements. Freedom Charter apostles, whether inside the ANC or in its splinter groups, vacillate between a capitalist agrarian policy, hollow promises and utter confusion. Mystifiers of the Freedom Charter in the SACP and trade unions tried to justify this twofaced agrarian policy with their National Democratic Revolution spin but dismally failed.
During three decades of managing South Africa’s neoliberal state, ANC bureaucrats have been shameless about their incompetence, corruption, self-enrichment and arrogance. Publicised scandals of capitalist landowners like Cyril Ramaphosa, Gwede Mantashe and Thandi Modise make up a small fraction of black elite land grabbing trumpeted as BBBEE successes. In the battle for land and ecological protection in Xolobeni, the state spearheads a murderous dispossession campaign at the behest of Mineral Commodities Ltd (ASX: MRC), a multinational corporation based in Australia. Freedom Charterists in government have been enforcing their neoliberal land reforms against the demands of the dispossessed, exploited and impoverished majority.
Two-faced and moribund Freedom Charter ideology has been revived through EFF and uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), political monstrosities bankrolled to debase anti-capitalist resistance. Hopelessly bereft of a solution to agrarian crises facing the masses, these ANC offspring can only echo absurdities such as the ‘radical interpretation of the Freedom Charter’ and undigested slogans like ‘expropriation without compensation’. Yet, through their deeds and words, they promote tribalism which is an anachronism that must be abolished for the demands and interests of the landless peasants and working class to be realised.