Ramaphosa forges ahead with land grab

South Africa gears up for land reform. Matthew Partridge reports.

Dr Matthew Partridge
By
published
in Features

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Ramaphosa: treading a dangerous path
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Earlier this month, Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's president, said that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) "would forge ahead with plans to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation", say Jason Burke and David Smith in The Guardian.

While no legislation has yet been passed, "all major political parties in South Africa have agreed there is a need for extensive land reform in the country". More than 70% of land is held by white farmers, according to official figures, even though white people make up just 8% of the population.

What the ANC is proposing "is pointless at best and dangerous at worst", says The Economist. While Ramaphosa "insists that land would be taken without harming the economy", investors "fear an incremental assault on property rights".

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Existing efforts to change land distribution have resulted in "corruption" and "spurious claims". Instead of trying to move land from one group to another, "the best place to start helping poor blacks is to let them secure their full rights to land they already hold" and to "release state-owned land, which makes up about 11% of the total".

Yet wider reform is sorely needed, says the Financial Times. Black Africans were unjustly stripped of their land in 1913 under the Natives Land Act. Previous attempts to redress this injustice had only "marginal success". The status quo is "morally and politically untenable" and doing nothing invites a violent reckoning. "Ramaphosa has a chance to go about this in a measured way. It is the alternatives that would spell disaster."

Dr Matthew Partridge
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri

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