Land bill a real danger - FW

2008-06-25 21:29

Cape Town - The expropriation bill could seriously damage South Africa's international creditworthiness, said former president FW de Klerk on Wednesday.

He told the Cape Town Press Club that the bill, before Parliament at present, was unconstitutional and struck at the heart of property rights.

It would allow any property to be expropriated in what the minister of land affairs construed to be "the public interest".

This property need not be limited to land, and could include shares.

De Klerk said the bill would have serious consequences for the economy, and the degree to which compensation fell short of perceived market value - a determination which the courts would be barred from changing - would be seen by markets as unfair deprivation of property.

"The consequent perception of arbitrary deprivation of property, I believe, will have a negative impact on national and international investor confidence, and will seriously damage South Africa's international credibility," he said.

'Delicate balance'

"At a stroke, most of the excellent work the government has done in the past 14 years to establish South Africa's creditworthiness could be undone."

De Klerk said section 25 of the constitution, which dealt with property, had been a sincere effort to achieve a delicate balance between protection of vested property rights, and the need for land reform.

"If this balance is disturbed, then the whole essence and the spirit of the agreement which was reached around section 25 will be undermined," he said.

"My contention is, and I feel very strongly about it, that this bill in its present form disturbs that balance in a very serious way."

Earlier on Wednesday, president of AgriGauteng André Botha said the government's underperformance on land reform would not be fixed by the bill.

"It is clear the challenges facing the government and organised agriculture in land reform have nothing to do with the acquisition of high-potential agricultural land by the government or the free-market price of land," he said.

Draconian law

Botha said that in Gauteng land had been offered to the government and, in most cases, the prices were acceptable to the sellers.

He said the real problem was the government's capacity to perform on the matter, and a draconian expropriation law would only aggravate the real problems.

Botha said in Gauteng, a database of farms available for purchase by the government had been drawn up.

Of these, 127 had been evaluated as economically viable units for the purpose of settling new farmers.

They represented 46 000ha of high-potential agricultural land and were made available to Gauteng's Department of Land Affairs (DLA) for land redistribution in 2007.

"However, notwithstanding meetings with the deputy director-general of the DLA in 2007 and again in February 2008, only seven of those farms have been transferred to date," said Botha.

Waiting months for offers

He said 71 of the viability reports that had to be furnished by Gauteng's Department of Agriculture Conservation and Environment were still outstanding.

Farmers were waiting up to nine months for an offer on land made available for reform.

"A production season has been lost and farms lay fallow while farmers involved in the process have lost income," he said.

- SAPA