The ANC has given up the fight to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation, until it can get a two-thirds majority of the vote.
Speaking after the party failed to secure enough support, the ANC's Mathole Motshekga, who led the ad hoc committee on land reform, said the constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill would not come back as long as they did not have the numbers needed.
“It's not the end of the road because we're still committed to redistributing land. In its current form, the constitution allows us to expropriate land for people.
“Those who think they've won have not. We’ve got the Redistribution Bill before parliament and this is another instrument we'll use to deliver our mandate.
“This one will not be brought back to parliament because we’ll end up right here. We don’t have a two-thirds majority and we'll need the buy-in of other parties.
“There’s this unholy coalition which formed before the local government elections with the aim of punishing the ANC. We saw the EFF form a coalition with the VF Plus and DA,” Motshekga said.
In order to get the bill through, the ANC needed at least 267 votes to pass the bill but only managed to secure 204. Of the 230 seats it has in parliament, only 200 MPs were present during the debate while 145 members voted against the bill.
Dating back to 2018, the proposed amendment to the constitution was meant to address the land ownership question and allow for the expropriation without compensation, Adv Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said.
“There were two areas of disagreements between the ANC and EFF. The first one was the custodianship – the EFF proposes wholesale state ownership while ANC proposes to retain the current private property model of land ownership subject to the right to expropriate in the public ownership.
“The second one was the right to expropriate. The EFF says whenever the states expropriates there should be no compensation, while the ANC says there are certain instances where compensation is required and those would be defined by legislation,” he said.
Ngcukaitobi added the proposal the ANC brought did not contain nationalisation of land or automatic non-compensation.
Asked what it would have meant to ordinary South Africans should the amendment had been successful, Ngcukaitobi said there would have been no difference. “The truth of the situation... the amendment was misguided from the onset. It was not intended to bring land to black people.
“The reason black people don’t have land is because of the failure of the ANC to undo legacy of spatial act and the colonial dispossession of land. The ANC has every instrument to engage in widespread distribution of land. The ANC had no legal impediment.
“This has served a distraction because people believed the ANC was unable to give them land because it was blocked by the constitution. ANC used the last four years to create a phantom of legal inhibition. ANC failed spectacularly,'' he said.
In a statement, EFF leader Julius Malema said in its current form, the bill represented a sell-out arrangement. “Compensation for expropriation still remains a default position of the bill. The bill also makes reference to a national legislation that must be developed to outline circumstances under which compensation for expropriation may be nil.
“We all know that the portfolio committee on public works has already jumped the gun and is processing the Expropriation Bill, which makes reference to 'nil compensation', but only for very limited categories of land.
“According to this Expropriation Bill, land that may be expropriated with nil compensation is abandoned land, land held for speculation purposes, land owned by the state and land that poses health and safety risks to the people.
“It is therefore clear that prime land suitable for agriculture, residential and industrial purposes would never be expropriated at the so called 'nil compensation'," Malema said.
DA parliamentary caucus chair Annelie Lotriet said they had long argued against amending Section 25 of the constitution because, in its current form, it already had enough provisions to enable a just and equitable land reform process.
