Tag Archives: Expropriation without compensation

Critique, Position, Report

When it comes to the property clause in our Constitution, watch the ANC like milk on fire

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Section 25 of the South African Constitution sets out your and my rights with respect to property. If South Africans are not ultra-vigilant, the ANC will gut those rights.

The State’s right to expropriation without compensation (EWC) is implicit in Section 25 of the South African Constitution, nothing needs changing.

Not so, argues the ANC and their EFF allies. EWC must be made explicit and to that end the ANC initiated and managed a multi-party parliamentary process culminating in a draft proposal (see below) to amend Section 25, which was Gazetted just before Christmas with a deadline for comments on the 31 January 2020.

Now, mere days before the deadline, we learn that the draft proposal for comment is in fact a dummy or, more exactly, a decoy.

This is the proposed draft amendment (changes to the Constitution indicated in bold)

(1) No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.

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History, Reflection

South Africa and the question of truth

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Hendrik Mentz says our current debate is riddled with category errors

First published by politcsweb

‘There is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us’ (Vasily Grossman)

For Maxim Gorky, there were two truths, and he advised Vasily Grossman to write the new truth of the (Communist) Revolution into his first novel, Glϋckauf, if he wished it to be published [1]:

We know there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates […] it is a disgusting and tormenting truth. It is truth we must struggle against and mercilessly extirpate. [2]

Grossman wrestled with Gorky’s dualistic epistemology until he concluded – as Plato had centuries before – there can only be one truth:

‘No, Marusya […] You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start playing at two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too – above all. When things are as bad as they are today – there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us. If the Germans enter Stalingrad, you’ll learn that if you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either. It’ll be the end of you.’ [3]

South Africa, and the question of truth

The challenge of what constitutes truth also faces South Africans today.

During the time of the first democratic elections in the country which ended apartheid (1994), our truth was the rainbow nation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela. Now, however, a quarter of a century on, the belief in our oneness has been shattered. Instead, Gorky’s sense of ‘a vile and dirty’ past with its ‘disgusting and tormenting truth’ is what now prevails with accusations of ‘white monopoly capital’, ‘you stole the land’ – and which must now be ‘mercilessly extirpated’ by a new truth that will liberate ‘the people’ from the shackles of a white colonial past.

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