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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2018 18:11:16 GMT
SOUTH Africa has withdrawn a farm expropriation bill just days after President Donald Trump tweeted he was closely watching the situation - but the bill is set to be replaced by a new act given the government more powers. The African National Congress (ANC) said that the bill which would have the power to take land away from white farmers to rebalance racial disparities needed to have further consideration. Nonceba Mhlauli, a spokeswoman for the ANC’s chief whip, said: “The bill in its current form would need to be re-considered in light of the process of reviewing Section 25 of the constitution for the expropriation of land without compensation. “Were the bill to be re-introduced, it would contain a clause or clauses reflecting expropriation of land without compensation if that is the way that South Africans have chosen to go.”
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2018 18:17:25 GMT
Let's break down the president's tweet into two parts. First, there's the claim that the South African government is seizing land from white farmers.
There's a lot of context needed there. Before and during apartheid, black families and communities in South Africa had their land stripped from them. Now, the South African government is allowing them to file a claim for it.
Once that claim is filed, the government and the current landowners negotiate a deal to turn over the land. If they can't agree on a deal, the government can take it — that's the "expropriation" part.
All of that is the manifestation of a 1994 law. In every exchange so far, the government has paid the farmers it's acquired land from. Now, the government wants to make expropriations easier and speed up the restitution process, potentially without payment to current landowners.
On to the second part of the president's tweet about the "large scale" killings. That's not rooted in conclusive evidence.
There's no accurate count of farmers in the country. That makes it really difficult to calculate a rate of murders. But the police in South Africa say in the 2017-2018 financial year, there were 47 farm murders. At most, the rate is probably around 100 per 100,000 farmers. So, low.
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2018 18:13:36 GMT
Everyone's talking about the land issue - all 55 million of the country’s citizens as well as uitlanders (outsiders) like Donald Trump. In fact, the US president appears so agitated about the issue that he instructed his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to intervene and stop what he calls “land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers” in our country. Whatever your views, you have to admit that South Africans owe a deep debt of gratitude to Trump. I realise I may have sometimes portrayed him as a bellicose bigot, but he’s now shown he has an amazing ability to unify people. When he sent his astonishingly intrusive late-night tweet to Pompeo, he probably did more to unite South Africans on this sensitive issue than the pope. Within minutes, there was a chorus of denunciations from political leaders of all persuasions, calling on Trump to stop stoking racial tensions here.
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Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2018 18:18:36 GMT
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress pledged to tackle land reform responsibly as investor concerns mount over plans to change the constitution to allow for expropriation without compensation. “We will not and will never subscribe to land grabbing in South Africa, we are orderly and we are organized in what we do,” Fikile Mbalula, the ANC’s head of elections and a member of the party’s decision-making National Executive Committee, said at a meeting with agricultural lobby group Agri SA in Pretoria on Friday. “We’re after a constructive resolution on expropriation of land, which now will include non-compensation.” The move to amend the constitution has added to wider emerging-market jitters in knocking the rand and South African bonds. Critics of the plan and investors have raised concerns that the move could lead to an erosion of property rights and ultimately, Zimbabwe-style farm seizures. The ANC decided at a conference in December that more needs to be done to correct racially skewed land ownership patterns dating back to colonial and apartheid rule. While there’s widespread consensus that land reform needs to be accelerated, there are widely divergent views as to how it should be done.
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Post by Admin on Feb 7, 2019 17:25:14 GMT
A law firm based in Perth, Western Australia, said the number of South Africans who have arrived on Australia’s shores since last February is estimated to be at least 162,000. Karen Kotze, a migration expert at Suffolk Law, said the firm receives “up to 10 enquiries a day” from South Africans considering making the move. In February, a record high of 500 migration information enquiries were submitted to the company over a 60-day period. It happened around the same time Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton said South Africa’s farmers deserved to be given “special attention” because they were facing violence and land grabs at home. Mr Dutton even offered to extend refugee or humanitarian status to the farmers. In December, the South African parliament approved a report endorsing a constitutional amendment that would allow for land to be taken from farmers without compensation.
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