Significant Omissions in the ANC’s Quest for the Land
The almost 2,000-word harangue by Sechaba Nkoana of the ANC Veterans League (The Mercury, August 12) claiming that opposition to the 2025 Expropriation Act is premised on the preservation of historical land imbalances is significant for what it omits.
Never has it been easier for blacks to own and develop land. They have the government on their side, they have BEE on their side, and they have globalist finance ready to plough investment. Why do they not simply get on with proving that they are resourceful and capable?
There are several instances where established farming enterprises have been ceded to black ownership in terms of land restitution, yet they have failed. Instead, such enterprises were subjected to asset stripping, stalled or discontinued production, exacerbated by communal conflict. Where would we all be if all the productive, white-owned farming enterprises were expropriated to correct the “historical imbalances?” Zimbabwe’s experience provides an indicator.
Yet that is what the ANC’s roadmap, the Freedom Charter, strives to achieve – “All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.” Ironically, while Mr Nkoana hammers on about demographic imbalances in land ownership, the Freedom Charter declares that “restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended.”
What that single statement conceals is the aim for all land to be owned by the socialist government, euphemistically, on behalf of the people. Put bluntly, private ownership of land would cease, and occupation of land or property would be as a tenant of the government. Already, state ownership of all water and mineral resources is an established beacon on the road to that destiny.
From another perspective, the rise of the Indian community to become an established, thriving and enterprising sector of the population should be an object lesson for the likes of Mr Nkoana. He would do well to ponder how they achieved that in the face of the same historical, colonial and apartheid restrictions to which blacks were subjected.
