Municipal government throughout SA continues to own upwards of five-million urban plots currently occupied by previously disadvantaged individuals. Many of these individuals, denied in the past the right to own any property by the apartheid government, have lived on these properties for their entire lives. The problem with this state of affairs is that 22 years after the end of apartheid, these individuals are still accepted as being mere tenants rather than property owners.
Yet there are civil society organisations that continue to push for more government ownership of property, rather than ownership by the people.
The Free Market Foundation embraces the concept that ownership does not only lead to immense economic benefits but also implies dignified living for the owner. In Africa, individuals and communities used to have a very close relationship with the land they lived on. During the colonial era, however, the Eurocentric institution of "expropriation" burst onto the scene, which deprived tens of millions of their land and property.
Today, expropriation, in all its colonialist glory, continues to be embraced by our democratic government. With the passing of the new Expropriation Act, our ostensibly "post-Apartheid" government is now itself enjoying the ideological fruits of colonialism.
Expropriation in the colonial era meant that the government could take property from its rightful owners and keep it for itself or hand it out to friends of the state. While much of the latter did indeed happen, vast tracts of land were kept by the government and eventually became "native reserves", and, of course, the urban "township". The result deprived the majority of South Africans of the immense sense of pride and dignity that came with having certain entitlements to property.
The urban township continues to exist today in much the same form as it did a century ago. The municipal government, or some other branch of government, usually owns the land upon which the township and the inhabitants are unable to legally sell, let or mortgage the property they occupy. They are not able to regard "their" properties in the same way as other South Africans in the suburbs can. The deprivation of ownership leads directly to a lack of investment by inhabitants in these properties and the absence of a property market.
If we wish to see townships become middle-class suburbs, we must address ownership. The socialist experiment of state ownership has clearly failed and produced bland, poor and unappealing areas where the government does not care to maintain the millions of plots and homes it officially owns. This is nothing new, for we know only private owners have a true incentive to maintain and develop their property.
It is unthinkable that "land reform" in SA, for some, seems to mean more of the same and not the advocating for the extension and strengthening of property rights for the poor and vulnerable.
It is time for real land reform. The legacy of apartheid can be healed only when we distance ourselves from the apartheid state-centric mind-set.
• Van Staden is a law student at the University of Pretoria and the Southern African Regional Director of Students for Liberty
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