Time for the ANC to leave behind expropriation without compensation

Expropriation without compensation is a concept that belongs to days gone by of cold war and communism and the ANC must part with it to allow South Africa to get on the road to recovery.

The government’s obsession with this concept is the origin of massive disinvestment, the lack of growth and competitiveness, job losses, the implosion of the Land Bank and economic decline.

The Land Bank’s total book consists of agriculture, of which the financing lies within the ownership of land as security. Threats to expropriate land without compensation contain serious negative consequences for every farmer and commercial bank, but for the Land Bank it endangered the continued existence of the bank.

The ANC should have long ago concluded from the reaction of South Africa’s trading partners, the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral international institutions that its association with expropriation without compensation will again condemn South Africa to paraya status, similar to Zimbabwe and Venezuela. No-one invests in a country where investors are in danger of being expropriated without compensation.

Nowhere has expropriation without compensation or at less than market value compensation in compulsory transactions had a good outcome. The world doesn’t understand that an idea that led to economic decline, sorrow and suffering everywhere it was instituted, will not progress differently under the ANC (with its miserable track record of failed institutions).

The simple fact that the ANC had to dispose the mainly written inputs of the business sector, employers, taxpayers and investors in the public consultation process with a trick so that the disjointed oral inputs of people that were transported to inaccessible places could be depended upon, already had to be an indication that nothing good will originate from this idea.

When the ANC was forced by Sakeliga to publicly announce the scientific impact study and they were caught out that they cooked it with flagrant falsehoods, the world already sensed that there is no integrity or substance behind their blind conduct with regards to a discredited policy.

Saai daily works with both white and black family farmers that suffer from the narrow-minded inside politics in the ANC that led to the motion regarding expropriation without compensation.

The ANC will also clearly not get the required majority in parliament to amend the Constitution. The huge price that South Africa paid for a poor idea wasn’t worth it.

In the interest of South Africa and its people, the ANC must admit its blunder, step away from it, and take the time to convince both local and international entrepreneurs that it is safe to invest in the country.