South Africa: Govt. to “Legally” Seize Land

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South Africa: Govt. to “Legally” Seize Land

June 2nd, 2016

Awake Goy

The South African parliament has finally passed the law which will allow the ANC government to legally seize white-owned land and hand it over to nonwhites.

The new “Expropriation Act” does away with the previous “willing seller, willing buyer” arrangement which was supposed to prevent a Zimbabwe-style land grab.

land reform

The ANC’s aim to “redistribute” land to Africans has proceeded far more slowly than initially planned, mainly because the white owners have almost always been offered payment far below market value and their investment costs.

In fact, in many instances, the amounts offered have not even been sufficient to clear the outstanding debt on a farm, making a sale impossible because it would leave the white owner homeless, unemployed, unemployable, and with a mountain of debt.

As long as the “willing seller, willing buyer” principle remained in place, it was not possible to force the whites off the land.

However, the new law—which now only awaits signature from the country’s president—stipulates that the government can now force the land owner to accept whatever is offered.

The law makes provision for the creation of structures to adjudicate on all land claims, and to make a decision where no agreement can be reached.

Crucially, the onus to prove the land’s value is transferred to the land owner—which means that a white farmer must now “prove” to a black committee that the amount on offer is insufficient.

With affirmative action and other anti-white discrimination already rampant in South Africa, the chances of any white succeeding in an action against the state is minimal.

Hence the new law has now effectively set the stage for the government to seize land—albeit in in a slightly more “controlled” manner than what happened in Zimbabwe, and with the proviso that the whites will still be paid, at least something, before being expelled.

The law however makes provision for the finalization of an expropriation without access to a court, and only allows the land owner to challenge the validity of an expropriation and eviction order once the whole process has been carried out.

In addition, the rights of third parties such as financial institutions with mortgage rights over a property have been largely disregarded.

* The ANC’s demand to “redistribute” farm land to blacks follows the historically invalid argument that the whites somehow illegally seized land from blacks.

In reality, the land now being claimed by blacks was largely unoccupied at the time of the white settlement of Southern Africa.

The areas which were under black occupation at that period in history were reserved for them in terms of the 1913 Land Act—and became the much-reviled “homelands” of the Apartheid era.

Other originally-occupied black areas were also reserved for the tribes which were there before the whites arrived, and are today the independent states of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland.

These three states were created by the British colonial administration using the exact same process and logic as the Apartheid-era homelands, but the world only regarded the Afrikaner-supported black homelands as “racist.”