Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane on Wednesday urged President Cyril Ramaphosa to hand State-owned land to citizens.

Maimane mooted the privatisation of State-owned land in this manner as an alternative to expropriation of private land to alleviate what the government terms an urgent land crisis.

"Let's privatise government-owned land... At the stroke of a pen we can ensure that land is transferred to our people," he said in the debate on the presidency budget vote.

Maimane added that the protection of private property rights was the bedrock of the South African economy.

He urged Ramaphosa to be bold and to forge a new economic consensus to counter what he said was an increasing, dialectical return to race trenches.

Failure to do so would "simply entrench the historical patterns of insiders versus outsiders".

Ramaphosa has vowed that his administration would push ahead with plans to amend section 25 of the Constitution to make explicit the circumstances in which land could be expropriated without compensation.