YONELA DIKO: Expropriation Act - Redress is good for all South Africans

The former chairperson of the Afrikaner Broederbond, Professor Pieter de Lange, and his team, after meeting the ANC delegation led by Thabo Mbeki in 1986, said: "Look, we Afrikaners thought we needed many things to secure our future… We thought if we didn’t have them, this black continent would swallow us up and the Afrikaners would cease to exist as a people. But the reality is that… we’ve not perished as a people since the Group Areas Act was rendered inoperable. That will open up the way to asking the question: Why do we need a white government anyway?”

In the last 38 years since De Lange made that observation, nothing that has happened has threatened the lives or livelihoods of Afrikaners or white South Africans in general. Every law that has been passed to redress the injustices of the past has not made their lives any worse off.

The fear, however, of being swallowed up by this 'Black Continent' from some quarters of the white community has reared its ugly head at every turn, and, after selling fear and a sense of exaggerated grievance by these pockets of white communities, the years have shown that these fears have only existed in their heads.

White South Africans are wealthier than they have ever been. 

While the majority of white South Africans do not fear a non-racial society, the few who traffic on fear, white grievance and protection of white privilege have been selling dooms day with every progressive legislation seeking to make our country fairer and more equal, from Employment Equity to Black Economic Empowerment, and more recent acts, BELA and NHI, and now Expropriation Act.

When affirmative action was introduced, Mandela observed in 1997 that “... Whenever we have sought real progress through Affirmative Action, the spokespersons of the advantaged have not hesitated to cry foul, citing all manner of evil - such as racism, violation of the constitution, nepotism, dictatorship, inducing a brain drain and frightening the foreign investor."

When the Employment Equity Act was finally enacted in 1998, then-leader of the Democratic Party, Tony Leon, opposed the bill, calling it a “pernicious piece of social engineering”. This has been the case with Black Economic Empowerment and other bills aimed at levelling the playing field and opening the economy to all South Africans.

Here we are again, with some representatives of white privilege selling all manner of evil that is supposedly going to come out of the latest bill that has just been passed to correct the injustices of the past.

It's 2025 and President Cyril Ramaphosa has just signed the Expropriation Act, which seeks to reverse the land dispossession of the colonial 1913 Act, which gave 87% of our land to white minorities, and left only 13% for Black South Africans.

After 30 years of singing the same song while becoming insanely wealthy, white fears are becoming pathological. It is not clear why these fears persist. 

While addressing the Goldman Sachs investor conference in May 2019, Ramaphosa said, “...Foreign investors have nothing to fear; there’s no way we can invite foreign investors to our country and say ‘come, invest’ and tomorrow we take your land away. That is not going to happen. That is not sensible. It’s not something that any sensible person does.”

The president also emphasised at the same conference that expropriation would happen. This is important because expropriating land for public purposes is not mutually exclusive with property rights - not here in South Africa or around the world.

Annelize Crosby, the head of legal intelligence at Agbiz, has noted as a matter of fact that “every government in the world can resort to expropriation as a means to acquire property for certain public purposes.” 

In fact, expropriation of land for public interest has been the law of the land even before the democratic dispensation and the Employment Act of 1975. The only contentious point now is the 'nil compensation' clause. This, however, will mostly be applicable to unproductive land that lays fallow. 

Given that a quarter of our people have moved from rural areas to urban centres in the last 25 years in search of work opportunities, we have already seen them invading land spaces that lay fallow because of shortages of land for housing in these urban centres. 

Expropriation gives government a legal mechanism to de-congest our people from informal settlements and finally have control of urbanisation, guiding people where they can settle, building dignified structures for our communities with roads, water electricity and other basic services. No community can claim to have been unjustly targeted to suffer from government policies.

This may explain why the Stellenbosch academic, Willie Esterhuyse, exclaimed all those years back after meeting Mbeki: “I am prepared to entrust my life to Mbeki. The main reason is the way in which he understood the Afrikaners’ predicament – it was incredible.”