Land Redistribution in South Africa: The Property Clause Revisited

Dr Lungisile Ntsebeza is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Since 1995, he has focused on the South African land reform programme and the process of democratization in South Africa's countryside.

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Discussants: Geert Geut, Southern Africa Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Marja Spierenburg, Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Information: The pace of land reform in South Africa is undeniably slow. At a `People’s Land Tribunal’ in December 2003, the Deputy Director-General of the Department of Land Affairs, Glen Thomas, admitted that after listening to witnesses describe the problems they had encountered in their attempts to access land through the land reform programme, he could understand their frustrations. More recently, in its Red October Campaign, the South African Communist Party, an alliance partner of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), has made similar pronouncements about the slow pace of land reform in South Africa. While it is generally accepted that the South African land reform programme is not occurring fast enough, there is no agreement on the reasons for its slow pace. This presentation will consider some of the reasons advanced by the government and critics of the programme, in particular the argument that the property clause in the Constitution is one of the fundamental obstacles to land redistribution in South Africa.