Is it time to panic about land expropriation?

News24 ^ | 2018-08-01 10:45 | Melanie Verwoerd

[Zhang Fei]

I have had a deal with a few of my friends who are farmers, that I will tell them when it is time to panic about the proposed expropriation without compensation. Until then, I advised them to relax.

Last night after President Cyril Ramaphosa's address to the nation in which he announced the ANC's decision to propose an amendment to the Constitution to expropriate without compensation, I got many texts asking: "Is it time yet?"

Let me say upfront that I think the ANC has been handling the land debate very clumsily (to put it politely). It is clear that the narrative has consistently been running away from them and every time in an attempt to regain control, they seem to cause more confusion and anxiety with investors as well as current property owners.

So, is it the end of the road for property rights as many are predicting today?

I don't think so.

It is important to remember that the ANC has always been clear that they could expropriate without compensation, therefore the constitutional amendment is intended to only clarify the current provision.

Of course, it is crucial to first see what these clarifications will be, and it is a real pity that the president did not again emphasise in his address last night what they intend and perhaps more importantly what they DON'T intend to do.

Ramaphosa's answers earlier this year in Parliament as well as ANC policy documents clearly indicate that the governing party does not intend to expropriate people's homes or productive farm land. They are talking about very specific instances of derelict buildings, unproductive farm land, land obtained through illegal means, etc. They are also adamant that it will be done on a case by case basis and not through a general blanket land grab

[Zhang Fei]

The expression "whistling past the graveyard" was probably coined to describe columns such as the above, by a Boer quisling who worked for the ANC.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Sit still, frog, while I turn it up another notch.

[thesharkboy]

“De Nile” is a river in Africa, but it’s pretty far north of there. Let’s see: The ANC’s official policy has been to take land owned by whites without compensation, and now that policy is enshrined in their constitution. I don’t know how much more clear it can be. It was time to panic a long time ago.

[gasport]

Identifier at end of article-
- Melanie Verwoerd is a former ANC MP and South African Ambassador to Ireland.

[Red Badger]

Well, Melanie, you sit on your rump until they take yours and then cry about it................

[blackdog]

Melanie is a very optimistic alligator feeder.

[Red Badger]

[Zhang Fei]

I owned some shares in South African miners a good while before the ANC announced this initiative. The moment it came out, several months ago, I bailed out of those shares. Zimbabwe beckons.

[petro45acp]

Didn’t think there was any land that hadn’t been expropriated officially, or unofficially by marauding bands of armed squatters. Wouldn’t an anthropologist call the land ‘approaching aboriginal?’

KYPD

[Simon Foxx]

If she is any relation to the late assassinated Prime Minister of the same last name, he’s spinning in his grave ...

[atomic_dog]

If you could go back in time, say to 1923 and assassinate Hitler would you? Someone should likewise smoke dear Cyril and do the world a favor.

[BitWielder1]

They are talking about very specific instances of derelict buildings, unproductive farm land, land obtained through illegal means, etc.

Do you really believe that?
They don't want the crappy farms, they want the good ones.

[robowombat]

She is also. I believe, the daughter of Hendrik Verwoerd, the PM of South Africa assassinated in 1966 and pretty much Mr. Apartheid. She is a good example of the liberal death wish embodied. South Africa is on the way to being another Haiti with the Chinese dominating the place economically. As in the USA all the things older white people said about what would happen when the first generation of civil rights leaders died out is coming to pass. White people need to start organizing for their own preservation.

[WKUHilltopper]

Wonder how much they paid this fool to write this?

[Zhang Fei]

[Didn’t think there was any land that hadn’t been expropriated officially, or unofficially by marauding bands of armed squatters. Wouldn’t an anthropologist call the land ‘approaching aboriginal?’

KYPD]

---

To my knowledge, nothing has happened yet. Farmers have been robbed, but that’s kind of par for the course for a crime-ridden majority black country that was very high crime even during the apartheid era. It’s not the governance - it’s South African blacks. You could probably get the crime rate down if you executed people at Singaporean rates - about 1 execution for every 2 homicides vs the less than 1 in 100 TX does. But even the Boers were too pinkoed out to enforce that level of deterrence.

[rstrahan]

Their version of the leftist US media. Can’t see what is actually happening because of their blinders.

[robowombat]

Its not who is President it is the movement. The tendency for black movements, BLM is a good example, is for them to be a combination of plunder and ethnic cleansing (if they get away with the latter). These people are greedy, vicious, stupid and full of hatred that whitey can some how do all this stuff they can’t even begin to figure out.

[Snickering Hound]

[EinNYC]

I hope the white farmers salt the land liberally as they pull away for a better place to live, out of South Africa. Even if they didn’t, the ignorants taking their land will turn it from a fertile food producer to a dustbowl.

[MeganC]

And that’s why we don’t have that swill in our house.