There had been nine defence settlement plans before Sir George Cathcart’s (then Cape Governor) plan to settle white farmers in the area that is now Komani (Queenstown). The earlier plans had failed to curb incursions by the AbaThembu and AmaGcaleka.
Cathcart’s plan after the eighth War of Dispossession (1850-53) involved every white settler receiving 809ha-1214ha of land taken largely from AbaThembu. It was free of charge if assurance was given that the settler would undertake “defensive” services as and when needed.
If the initial settler sold the farm the buyer inherited the obligation to “arm and mount” himself. This obligation to defend an ostensibly “besieged” laager of interests, however they might be defined, transcended the initial settler.
In the new SA that ever-present instinct of being ever under siege is difficult to overcome for many. It was on display when Louis Luyt and the rugby barons took then president Nelson Mandela to court for setting up a commission to probe racism in the sport. It is there in the debate on rural community safety today, framed as “farm murders”, as if police stations in rural villages do not deal with the same widespread insecurity and terror.
It was also on display recently after the passing of the Expropriation Act, and in the discussions after a parliamentary reply on the Transformation Fund that is being discussed at the department of trade, industry & competition.
While both processes arise from attempts to compact on predictable terms on issues of redress and public interest, in line with existing legislation, they can suffer from a micro-focus on targeted outcomes.
In all of these instances it seems it has been “only too easy to stir up the baser feelings that ...[are] enhanced in a society with a history such as ours”, as Mandela put it a few months after being hauled to court. This feeling of being under siege arises from our history and confronts with consternation the decisions of credible democratic processes and institutions.
On the Transformation Fund I concede bias, having been involved as an adviser in a few of the public interest discussions over mergers and done some analysis of investment plans under the equity equivalent investment scheme. While both processes arise from attempts to compact on predictable terms on issues of redress and public interest, in line with existing legislation, they can suffer from a micro-focus on targeted outcomes.
To achieve the scale necessary to deal with the prevailing economic dominance in product markets and the imperative of transformation and inclusion, they must empower the challenger firm in a product market and enable the skilling, and acquisition of productive assets by those who otherwise would not have had such opportunity.
The means of achieving such an outcome is a matter for discussion, preference and what may be possible within set constraints. Is it a fund? Is it an aggregation of investment commitments in a specific set of demographic, geographic and sectoral priority areas? Who manages it and why?
All of these are necessary questions. However, the alarm expressed by the “besieged” tends to characterise the discussion as excessive government intervention, despite it being a priority of the seventh administration.
Many have correctly indicated that the provisions of the Expropriation Act are not new, and nor does it spell the end of protections to private property. Rather, the act recasts under the new constitutional dispensation enabling legislation for organs of state to undertake expropriation (with different forms of compensation, including “nil compensation”) for public purpose and in the public interest.
The 1975 act it replaces changed other prevailing legislation in electricity, posts, telecommunications, rail, roads and other public purpose areas, including in urban housing, where it empowered the apartheid state to expropriate land to resettle those who had been forcibly removed from elsewhere.
The new act not only regularises this framework in the constitutional dispensation with its own requirements of redress, but frames this question of property expropriation for “public purpose” alongside “public interest”, and prioritises a commitment to land reform and to reforms to bring about equitable access to natural resources.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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