MICHAEL MORRIS: Amendment deprives the rural poor of property rights - Business Day
Michael Morris
How much less constitutional freedom should black people living in the countryside have than, say, Gwede Mantashe or Johann Rupert or any of the rest of us who live in towns and cities, just as we please?
If this seems a staggering question, more astonishing by far is that shockingly little in the way of any questions have been raised over a law not even two months old that robs the ordinary freedoms of an estimated 470,000 black South Africans — the supposed beneficiaries of post-1994 measures intended as compensation where people were forcibly removed from agricultural land by the apartheid state.
A striking exception, however, is a report published last week, “Property Rights Deprived at Agricultural CPAs”, by my colleague, Institute of Race Relations Fellow Gabriel Crouse.
From it, we learn that in terms of the Communal Property Associations (CPA) Amendment Act signed into law in October, the hundreds of thousands of people living on CPA land are deprived of the right to lease or sell their own land without first acquiring “consent” from a government official.
For good reason, Crouse describes these nearly half a million people, occupying an estimated 2.8-million hectares of farmland across the country, as “some of the most hard-done-by landowners in the rainbow republic”.
The report acknowledges that “it is typical for landowners to have to provide documentation to the state before concluding a deal pursuant to rules of sale for various classes of major assets. As a rule, the purpose of such requirements is to secure the informed consent of both parties and the legality of the transaction, or to mitigate harmful third-party effects.”
This would be true for Mantashe, or Rupert, or you and me.
But people on CPA land “must get ‘consent’ for a different reason, as they now must show a government official that it is in their own interest to lease or sell their own property”.
Crouse writes: “This fundamental deprivation of control over their assets has radically transformed CPA landowners into second-class investors, with a status equivalent to that of minors (children) who need adult ‘consent’ to sell immovable property held in their name.”
Chatting to Crouse about what he has described as “the infantilisation of CPA landowners specifically and poor, rural black South Africans generally”, I recalled my Business Day column of February 25 2019, which began: “I nearly fell off my chair in a recent radio debate when the host put it to me with levelling confidence: isn’t the problem with giving poor black South Africans rights to property that they might just go and sell it the next morning?”
I remember still the nonplussed reaction when I replied: “Why on earth shouldn’t they?”
As I wrote then: “The perceived ‘risk’ of the poor actually having assets, and trading them, points to the least appealing of all the impulses that bind much of the intelligentsia: their enthusiasm for the idea that the poor need to be told how to live.”
Crouse addresses the fuller nature of this threat in noting that against the “deeply ingrained” idea that “poor, rural, black adults of healthy body and mind are somehow second-class citizens ... is a small but growing commitment to treat people with respect regardless of their race.
“However, the scant attention received by the CPA Amendment Act indicates that where the victims of state attacks on property rights lack the wealth to hire their own lobbyists directly, civil society leaves a rather wide and lamentable void of (relative) silence.”
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.