South Africa’s push to allow land expropriation without compensation has become a test of whether the ANC can correct historic racial inequality without damaging food production, investor confidence or political stability.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the process will be carried out in a way that protects food security and the wider economy. David Masondo, who sits on the ANC’s Economic Transformation Committee, has said unused land would be the main target, while also warning that traditional leaders could resist the plan.
The proposal has reopened comparisons with Zimbabwe, where land seizures under Robert Mugabe helped trigger economic collapse. South African analysts say the country is not automatically headed for the same outcome, but they caution that property rights, production and investment could all suffer if the reform is mishandled.
Agriculture makes up less than three percent of national output, yet it employs about 850,000 people, or roughly five percent of the workforce. South Africa is also the continent’s largest maize producer and the world’s second-biggest exporter of citrus fruits, so any disruption could quickly feed into food inflation and hit poorer households hardest.
The government has already advanced redistribution in some cases. Ramaphosa recently handed more than 4,000 hectares to the KwaMkhwanazi community in KwaZulu-Natal Province. The transfer involved 4,586ha near Empangeni and followed a successful claim by a community that says it was dispossessed in stages, first after World War One and later in the 1940s when white farmers expanded commercial cane and timber operations.
The ANC wants to change the constitution so that land can be expropriated without compensation in order to address racial disparities in ownership that have persisted since apartheid ended in 1994. Ramaphosa has insisted the effort is based on “restitution rather than retribution”.
Since 1994, the party has relied on a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model in which the state purchases white-owned farms for redistribution. Progress has been slow. Government figures based on title deeds show blacks own 4 percent of private land, while only 8 percent of farmland has been transferred, far below the 30 percent target that was supposed to have been reached in 2014.
Prof Ben Cousins of Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape has said the figures are incomplete because they do not capture private transactions in which black farmers bought land on their own. A separate land-claims process has also been running for people and communities dispossessed under white rule, but most settlements have involved cash compensation from the state rather than the return of land itself, and 87 percent of the claims have been urban.
Former President Thabo Mbeki has criticised the expropriation drive in his document What then about land Expropriation without Compensation, arguing that it departs from the ANC’s non-racial founding principle. He also said the position taken by KwaZulu-Natal’s King Goodwill Zwelithini has complicated the issue because the king oversees the Ingonyama Trust, which controls the former Zulu homeland.
The trust remains one of the biggest political obstacles in the debate. King Zwelithini has resisted efforts to dissolve it, and Prof Cyril Mbatha of the University of South Africa says expropriating land from institutions such as the Ingonyama Trust would be politically difficult for the ANC, even if the moral case for reform is strong.
“Even when there are huge moral reasons why traditional leaders should step away from managing ancestral land- the management systems have proved to replicate rural inequalities. They discriminate against female and child headed households, which are the most vulnerable groups in those settings. Morally, this should change,” Prof Mbatha says.
“Technically, traditional leaders with their networks of patronage sabotage many rural empowerment programmes. It makes sense for this land to be managed by the State.”
A panel headed by former President Kgalema Mothlanthe has already proposed dissolving the Ingonyama Trust, a move King Zwelithini has condemned. That leaves the government facing a difficult political and legal path as it tries to push land reform forward.
The ANC’s internal argument also reflects a broader ideological shift. Mbeki has said the party’s support for expropriation without compensation has moved it closer to the position long championed by Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, which has made land expropriation without compensation its central demand.
South Africa’s proportional representation system gives smaller parties leverage in close contests. The EFF holds six percent of parliamentary seats, and in 2016 it helped the Democratic Alliance take control of key metropolitan areas, including Pretoria. That history has made the ANC wary of appearing weak on land reform ahead of elections.
Analysts still say South Africa is unlikely to repeat Zimbabwe’s experience, largely because many of the new farmers there lacked capital and commercial farming experience. Even so, they warn that any assault on property rights could damage investor confidence and produce wider economic fallout.
One historical reference in the debate reaches back to 1959, when the Pan-Africanist Congress was formed by breakaway ANC members in Orlando, Soweto, on April 5-6, 1959. The group rejected the Freedom Charter, including its guarantees for minority rights, and argued that land taken by white settlers should be returned to indigenous people.
That history is used in the article to show how sharply the land question has long divided South African politics, even as the current ANC leadership insists its own approach is meant to correct past dispossession without triggering economic collapse.
