Jessie Duarte represents unworkable, outdated and unrealistic ANC factional thinking
22 September 2021
The Ad Hoc Group for the Protection of Property Rights has taken note of ANC Secretary-General Jessie Duarte's remarks on Monday on Expropriation without Compensation at a media conference. During the interview, she elaborated on the ideological fiction that expropriation without compensation (EWC) is at the heart of economic development.
This position flies directly in the face of a finding by the Institute of Race Relations that expropriation threatens "the property rights of all South Africans: from the 9.5 million people with homeownership to the approximately 18 million with customary law plots and the estimated 17 million who are members of pension funds. It would also harm all business owners, large and small. At the same time, the economic consequences of the Bill would further harm the 11 million individuals who are currently unemployed, by reducing investment, limiting growth and hampering post-lockdown recovery."
How out of step Jessie Duarte's outdated ideological thinking is, and how wide the factional divide, can be seen in Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana's speech yesterday in which he expressed, among other things, a very important economic perspective by saying: “Ultimately, the point we are making is that industrial development is critical for our aspirations, as a nation, for higher levels of economic growth, job creation, transformation, and development. Structural transformation also has development implications, in that it contributes to promoting and maintaining a competitive economic environment that helps firms to grow and produce profitably. We are of the view that government expenditure should complement and enable rather than substitute for production in the private economy.”
In our view, the insistence on expropriation without compensation forms part of persistent efforts by the state to expropriate property and not just land – and we believe it is a thinly veiled attempt to nationalise private property.