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According to the Minister of Public Works, the controversial Expropriation Bill is set to be re-introduced to Parliament in January 2011. He made this point in his budget vote speech, delivered yesterday. The Bill was previously shelved by Parliament in 2008 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional - it vested power in government officials to decide on the amount of compensation for expropriated land, rather than the courts. Should this provision not be removed when the Bill is re-introduced, the Democratic Alliance (DA) will block any attempts at its ratification.

The DA fully supports an equitable and sustainable land reform process as it is imperative that South Africa's skewed patterns of land ownership are urgently modified. However, this process must be carried out within constitutionally set parameters and must not allow for arbitrary land dispossession.

The Constitution states:

"Property may be expropriated only ... (a) for a public purpose or in the public interest; and (b) subject to compensation, the amount of which and the time and manner of payment of which have either been agreed to by those affected or decided or approved by a court."

The placing of the decision-making power in terms of the awarding of compensation in the hands of government officials constitutes a full-on-attack on two of the most fundamental principles in our Constitution - the rights to recourse to the courts and the right to be protected from arbitrary expropriation. Should this provision be allowed, it will result in the stripping the protection of the courts from anyone, who owns any form of property, from having the state take it away without sufficient reason.

The re-introduction of this bill constitutes yet another indication that the ANC-government is hell bent on trampling over the constitution in order to achieve its objectives. While it is indeed true that the land reform process has not reached its stated objectives, this is not as a result of the requirements set out in the Constitution, but as a result of various institutional inadequacies in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform.

If the Department is serious about land reform, it needs to consider the following, far more fundamental problems, and get to work solving them:

The relatively short amount of time allocated for the land reform process to be completed;
Insufficient budgetary allocations;
The failure of the ANC government to view the massive amounts of public money used to effect restitution as an investment and as therefore putting in place measures to ensure the success of these enterprises. To date, 90% of restituted land has failed;
The failure to distinguish between landlessness and homelessness;
Skills shortages in the departments responsible for land reform;
A lack of cohesion between the national and provincial spheres of government; and
The crippling of land reform financing institutions such as the Land Bank due to corruption and mismanagement at the hands of ANC elites