The ANC’s planned constitutional amendment will not make “one iota of difference” to fixing the land shambles, says one of South Africa’s leading experts on land reform.
“I am not interested in whether the constitution changes,” said Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
This was because section 25 of the Constitution already gave the government a mandate for transformation, but it had set out to achieve the opposite.
“The pace of land redistribution has declined from about half a million hectares per year at its zenith in 2007/8 to one-tenth of that in 2015/16,” Hall said in a public lecture at UWC on Thursday.
“This has nothing to do with the Constitution; it has been a political choice to dismantle land reform over the past 10 years.”
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