John Steenhuisen | If you care about SA, join us in fighting Expropriation Without Compensation | News24

In the face of this crisis, the decision to persist with a policy that will turn South Africa into an investment wasteland and condemn these mostly young South Africans to a lifetime of poverty is unforgivable, writes John Steenhuisen.

Of all the bad policies and programmes currently implemented or under consideration by the ANC government, one poses a significantly bigger threat to the future of our country than any of the others, and that is Expropriation Without Compensation. The unraveling of property rights will put paid to any hope of the kind of investment needed to salvage our failing economy.

The next worst thing, after certain EWC, would be uncertainty around this policy. And now we seem to have both of these things. Thanks to three different messages on EWC from three different ANC mouths, no one has any idea what the government’s position on land, ownership and property rights is.

This position ranges from nationalisation-by-stealth of all land under the guise of “custodianship”, as confirmed by the ANC in the ad hoc committee, to a flat out denial by the President that this is the intention of government. Somewhere in between, we have the ANC’s Vuzimusi Xaba offering up some sort of hybrid position involving “temporary” custodianship.

It is perhaps not surprising that government can’t express its position on EWC as it finds itself increasingly torn along factional lines on most issues. The party under Zuma chased the EFF down the populist land rabbit hole, and Ramaphosa ended up in possession of the EWC football when he assumed the captaincy.

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But if there is to be some kind of reversal of government’s position on EWC, it has to happen now. Because we’ve seen this movie plot before, where the ANC government finally comes to some sort of sense and tries to hit the brakes or turn away from whatever disaster they were steering toward, but always way too late.

Just this week President Ramaphosa announced that the cap for electricity generation without a licence would be raised all the way to 100MW, which is great. Except this should have happened a decade ago. Because all this time, as energy ministers stubbornly refused to loosen the reins a little so that others could pick up some of the slack, our economy has been plummeting off a cliff and millions more have joined the ranks of the unemployed.

It took almost unbearable pressure from all sides to force government’s hand on the power generation issue. This wasn’t the President and his cabinet having a Damascus moment. They simply had nowhere else to go. But now we’re supposed to be grateful for the lifting of the cap while the irreparable damage has already been done.

Doublespeak

The same could now happen on the EWC issue, only with an even more destructive effect. By the time government wakes up to the danger, it might already be too late because it’s not only the expropriation of property itself that will torpedo our economy. It is also the threat thereof, and the doublespeak around the issue. Since Ramaphosa first announced EWC three years ago in 2018, the value of our financial sector has fallen by a third. We are now the only sizeable emerging market country that has a net outflow of foreign direct investment. 

Naturally, this will all be blamed on the Covid crisis, but we need to be smart enough to see through all the smoke and mirrors. In Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, FDE fell by 11% in 2020. In South Africa, it fell by 46% over the same period. We have, by the hand of our own government, become uninvestable.

There are several other reasons for this, too, ranging from unworkable labour laws, the world’s most unreliable electricity, terrible safety, poor water security and a labyrinth of red tape. But by far, the biggest nail in the coffin of our economy is the ANC government’s threat to amend the Constitution to expropriate property.

If President Ramaphosa had been paying attention, there was a valuable lesson on offer in the North-West province last week. When Clover announced that it was shutting down its cheese factory in Lichtenburg, they made a rational business decision. They weighed up all the pros and cons. They decided it was worth their while to spend R1.5bn of their own money on relocating the entire operation rather than stay and deal with non-existent services and non-existent infrastructure maintenance.

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Of course, once that horse had bolted, the woeful Ditsobotla municipality leapt into belated action, begging Clover to stay. But it was a done deal, and hundreds of direct local jobs plus who knows how many indirect jobs instantly evaporated. Clover had been pleading with the local government for years to make it possible for them to stay but to no avail. They would only sit up and listen once it was too late.

This same story is busy playing out on a national level, and, just like the Ditsobotla Mayor, Cyril Ramaphosa doesn’t seem to want to listen. Businesses and investors are already packing up and heading elsewhere, and we are in the middle of an unprecedented jobs bloodbath. The latest expanded unemployment rate of over 43% only tells part of the story. Hidden in that stat is the fact that three-quarters of these people have been out of work for more than a year, and a third of them have never had a job. They are not just unemployed but, to put it bluntly, virtually unemployable.

In the face of this crisis, the decision to persist with a policy that will turn South Africa into an investment wasteland and condemn these mostly young South Africans to a lifetime of poverty is unforgivable. 

No budgets

EWC never was about land justice, despite all the bluster and rhetoric. It’s not about making South Africans landowners. It’s not about empowering them with title deeds so that they can raise capital, make improvements and pass their asset on to their children. Our Constitution already had provisions to do all these things, but the ANC put no budget behind it because it was never intended.

For the ANC, it’s simply about control. An all-powerful state that owns everything and controls everything, and citizens who must then live at the mercy of this state-dependent on welfare, dependent on services, dependent on healthcare and dependent on being able to lease a patch of land from the state.

Countries that set off down this road all end up in the same place. Just ask our neighbour, Zimbabwe. This is not the South Africa the DA envisages. We want growth and prosperity. We want opportunities for investors and opportunities for job-seekers. We want people to own their properties and to build intergenerational wealth, which is why we will fight EWC with everything we have. And we ask that you please join us in this fight.

– John Steenhuisen is the leader of the Democratic Alliance.

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