Land confiscation in South Africa

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Land confiscation in South Africa

Postby cmsellers » Wed Aug 22, 2018 2:05 am

It is too bad that Slash and Arkyle do not seem to be around any longer, because I would like to see what they have to say about this.

But first, a bit of history. When South Africa was conquered by the Boers and the British, large tracts of land were expropriated without fair compensation (or compensation at all) for use by white farmers and ranchers. In other words, it was a lot like what happened when the US took land from the Indians, or the Turks took land from the Armenians, except that the descendants of the people who lost the land are a demographic majority.

The descendants of the original owners are mostly poor, and understandably resentful about the whole thing, and many have demanded that the original theft be reversed by a second theft, also without compensation. However the original expropriations mostly look place in the nineteenth century, and it is not clear to me how much of the white-owned land is owned by the heirs to the beneficiaries of the original confiscations.

Under Mandela and all subsequent presidents until the current one, even the notoriously corrupt and autocratic Jacob Zuma, the South African government has followed a "willing buyer, willing seller" policy, in which the government negotiates with white land owners on a fair price for the land, which is then put in the hands of black owners. Under Zuma, campaigns of harassment and murder made selling look like the only option for some white farmers, and this came under heavy criticism in right-wing sources (who often overstated the danger white South Africans face), and lighter criticism in some mainstream sources, such as The Economist.

Dealing with a struggling economy and widespread poverty and corruption, often of their own making, the African National Congress has seen their support erode. Apparently as an attempt to shore up support, they are finally doing what a lot of their younger, angrier supporters have demanded: attempting to take land from white farmers without fair compensation.

The first step in this was trying to seize a farm at roughly 1/10th of its value under the current constitution, which calls for pair payment except in a few limited cases, reportedly as a test case to see if the courts will allow it. However at the same time, they are pursuing amending the constitution to take land without compensation.

Now, you could make an argument that if the land is still owned by the heirs to the first white owners, and they received it when it was seized from black tribes without compensation, then it would be fair to seize it back without compensation, though as far as I can tell, the South African government is not limiting it to such cases. But even if you can make the case that it might be fair, it is a monumentally bad idea.

You are not just striking at the sanctity of property rights when you do this, you are striking at the rule of law. If the South African government will seize white-owned land, what is to stop them from seizing white-owned businesses next? This is going to hurt the South African economy in both the short and long term by scaring off foreign investment, and I imagine it will lead to an increased rate of white and Indian South Africans emigrating and/or storing assets overseas.

And another issue: none of what I have read has explained how the South African government determines who gets the land under the current program, much less who will get the expropriated land. Given that affirmative action in South Africa has mostly benefited well-connected ANC supporters, and given that land seizures in Zimbabwe and Venezuela mostly benefited cronies of the ruling party as well, I bet that this new windfall of white-owned land also goes to the cronies of the well-connected.

At a certain point, bad economic policies form a negative feedback loop that is hard to escape until you hit bottom. We saw it in Venezuela and Zimbabwe and we are seeing it now in Turkey. And the ANC has decided that the solution to their poor economic policies is to pursue worse economic policies. I doubt that they will back out, I am so convinced that the death spiral of the South African economy is imminent that if I had money to invest, I would probably be shorting the rand right about now. The sad thing is that it like the peasants under communism and blue collar workers under Trumpism, it will be the poor black voters the ANC is pretending to help who will suffer most from the ANC's mismanagement.
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Re: Land confiscation in South Africa

Postby JamishT » Wed Aug 22, 2018 4:06 am

I haven't looked into this that much, but I've seen posts about it on Imgur. According to commenters there (and who knows how accurate they are), another problem with the land seizures in Zimbabwe was that the new owners of the farms didn't know what they were doing and plunged the country into a near famine (or something like that). It makes sense to me that people who think they can farm are in for a surprise, but at the same time it sounds like a bit of white supremacy. It's just too bad I don't care enough to actually do the research.
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Re: Land confiscation in South Africa

Postby cmsellers » Wed Aug 22, 2018 4:17 am

JamishT wrote:I haven't looked into this that much, but I've seen posts about it on Imgur. According to commenters there (and who knows how accurate they are), another problem with the land seizures in Zimbabwe was that the new owners of the farms didn't know what they were doing and plunged the country into a near famine (or something like that). It makes sense to me that people who think they can farm are in for a surprise, but at the same time it sounds like a bit of white supremacy. It's just too bad I don't care enough to actually do the research.

It is not white supremacy. Mugabe's cronies were mostly not farmers. You saw similar issues when Mao and Pol Pot tried to turn city dwellers into farmers.

If you gave me a profitable farm and asked me to run it, I can almost guarantee that I would make a loss in the first year. And I both come from a rural area and already know a little bit about farming, and have the sense to defer to people who know what they are doing (most large farms have employees) as much as possible.
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Re: Land confiscation in South Africa

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:02 pm

Hell yeah blame the farmers, kill those fuckers and take their land.

Worked out perfectly for the Soviets right?

Wait, I mean "Kill Whitey!".
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Re: Land confiscation in South Africa

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 23, 2018 1:57 am

iMURDAu wrote:Wait, I mean "Kill Whitey!".

No, no, no, MURDA!

It's "shoot kill the Boer!"


Note that this video is on a channel with a name honoring a notorious white supremacist. It was the best video of one of several times that Julius Malema sang this song which I could find. The name and stated purpose of the channel highlights an unfortunate fact about the South African farm murders: they were seized on, exaggerated, and used as a dog whistle by white supremacists. This made nearly everyone else loathe to comment on it (I sure was), and made any white person who did comment on it immediately suspect.
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