"Let's see, land snatching... land snatching... land snatching...ah, here it is - Land: See Snatch."
Posted on 09/18/2005 1:41:03 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa, seeking ways to speed up the redistribution of land, said on Tuesday its constitution does not specify that the sale of land must be voluntary and at market prices.
"The willing-buyer, willing seller approach is not something provided in the constitution," Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told parliament during a regular question-and-answer session with legislators.
Land is a sensitive issue in South Africa where the white minority still owns the most of the agricultural land more than a decade after the end of apartheid.
The government has been careful to distance itself from the approach taken in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where often violent seizures of white-owned farms have been blamed for a collapse in agriculture and a deepening political crisis.
But frustration is growing about by the slow pace of putting land into black hands, prompting a review of the state's policy of "willing-buyer, willing-seller", which sees it offering market-related prices to farmers willing to sell land identified for redistribution.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said the government was considering various proposals from a recent land summit such as the expropriation of land and scrapping restrictions on sub-dividing land.
"Government will do everything within its power to avoid a situation where people become so desperate about the land situation that they resort to desperate means," she said.
Dirk du Toit, the deputy minister of land affairs, told parliament's land committee the constitution also did not specify that the state should offer market prices for redistributed land.
"I think it is unconstitutional to use market value for these transactions," he said, referring to instances where farmers demand high prices despite the land not being used for productive farming.
The constitution provided for the expropriation of land "with just and equitable compensation" and not market-related prices, he said.
Africa is in the process of destroying itself. This news is but one more step in that direction.
Oh...
Yeah. Never mind.
Will the Boers go without a fight?
Boy, what a banana republic. What kind of a third-rate outfit twists their own constitution around to allow the confiscation of private property, not for public use but to hand it to other private individuals? That kind of thing could never happpen here in the good ol' U. S. of A.
Time for an Orange Free State.
I hope not.
Maybe if we help them in South Africa, they will come help us in New London.
Did I just hear the sound of another South African country that could feed itself being flushed into the toilet of starvation and poverty?
"The willing-buyer, willing seller approach is not something provided in the constitution," Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told parliament during a regular question-and-answer session with legislators.
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That is a really bad precedent to be setting. That is the type of animal that grows out-of-control.
GET OUT NOW. Sell your house and land...before it is too late, and leave. The handwriting is on the wall, the "officials" are cooking up a scheme to get your "stuff" even as we speak.
S.A. will be just like Zimbabwe in a couple of years. People will be reduced to cannibals when the food runs out.
Not without some dead bodies (read: Government seizure officials) littering the front yards and farm fields of a whole lot of Americans.
I am 26-years-old and my wife recently purchased our first home. I can not imagine someone trying to come in a take my home/land from me let alone my parents land that has been in the family for generations.
We once held private property sacred.
"Article V - No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
eeep...
Read that carefully. The landowner is just entitled to 'just compensation' if it is being taken for public use. If it is being taken for private use, as just approved by the SCOTUS, there is no requirement that the compensation be just.
I understand that, but who determies what is "just"? I can just see the Left trying to foist some unwanted BS on Christians and forcing them into hovels. That's "just" for them.
I believe we should ammend it to add in the ability to call a referendum. Even if the compensation is truly just, if the person doesn't want to go, it is still bad.
Thanks for expanding my understanding of the Kelo case. I thought she got just compensation.
Get out with what you can , while you can. Burn anything of value as you leave and salt the earth.
YOU forgot to tell them not to move here because we can now do thesame.
I think it was Kelo where they said that the compensation would be at the rates the property was worth when the case started, not the current higher values. The compensation would then be offset by the rental value of the homeowner having stayed there since the case started (without credit for the real estate taxes which have been paid over the years).
So, if you consider an outcome where the homeowner gets nothing, loses the land, and OWES money to the government to be 'just compensation', so be it.
"We once held private property sacred."
Not quite. Legend has it that the original draft of the Declaration of Independence read ". . .life, liberty and property." Supposeldy "property" was too radical, and was replaced with the watered-down "pursuit of happiness."
I feel the same way.
My father-in-law bought 50 acres and a ramshackle farmhouse back in the '40s when land was cheap and plentiful. He built this house 40 years ago.
Now everything around us is getting developed, and I am sincerely afraid of some deep-pocketed and politically connected developer making the case that 10 McMansions would pay more in taxes than our house.
I love peace and hate violence, but a man can only be pushed so far.
World's worst racists:
Black African dictators
Black American civil rights leaders
Black inner city mayors
American liberals of every color
I agree, but at least we have a great many people - maybe a substantial majority - who know that allowing the forcible transfer of property from one group to another is wrong. And we have a way to reverse this decision. In South Africa and in all of Africa there is no such consciousness.
From food exporter to basket case, in two generations
And who exactly was living in the areas settled by the Boers?
there's a looooooooooong history of it in south africa
Having been stripped of much their property and their rights by the British, the Boers won a temporary independence in the Orange Free State.
Confiscation of their land by the present government of South Africa will bring starvation and probably civil war, with the Boers making an alliance, if possible, with the Zulus against the Xhosas, and most of the English speakers fleeing the country (many have already left).
South Africa is a wonderful country, carved out of nothing by an industrial people. Within 20 years it will go the way of Rhodesia, and become just another sub-Saharan country ruled by tribalism, unable to feed itself and saying it is all the fault of whites.
I had originally hoped de Klerk would call for a big conference with all the top ANC members to be held in SA, and then promptly have them all shot.
That might have given constitutional reform the best chance for success.
South Africa will have starvation problems within twenty years. It will take time, but South Africa will go down the same road the rest of Africa has gone down. It is only a question of when.
Will the Boers go without a fight?
It might already be far too late to fight.
ah... the next step in the zimbabwefaction of a formerly self-reliant and productive (if flawed) nation.
Confiscation of their land by the present government of South Africa will bring starvation and probably civil war, with the Boers making an alliance, if possible, with the Zulus against the Xhosas, and most of the English speakers fleeing the country (many have already left).
You forget the power of starvation. The British used it successfully (together with concentration camps) against the Boers in the Boer War, and later against the German civilian population during (and after!) both World Wars. The Soviets used starvation successfully as a weapon agains the Ukrainians and Kulaks. Mugabe is using it now against his enemies. That's why African dictators don't care about ruining their own country's agriculture: it gives them greater power. He who controls the food, controls the population.
It's probably too late for the Boers to "find allies" in meaningful numbers since their allies are also vulnerable to the food weapon. Also the Boers are small in number and their population not concentrated enough to be defensible. With the greater restrictions on the ownership of firearms, they are becoming increasingly more vulnerable as well. Boer farmers are killed regularly as well in a suspiciously systematic way, and this in spite of the fact that there is no official Zimbabwe-style "land confiscation" plan in force yet in South Africa. Wait until Mandela dies; when that happens the sh!t will really hit the fan.
"Let's see, land snatching... land snatching... land snatching...ah, here it is - Land: See Snatch."
I truly appreciate wry humor.
Get out , then nuke it from space, it's the only way. (borrowing from Aliens,the movie.)
I hope some of those at risk are allowed to come here, or will our government turn a blind eye like they did in Zimbabwe...
If Mugabe, Chavez, and the U.S. Supreme Court can do it, why not? Everybody's doing it, so it must be OK.
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