Wildly incorrect figures on land ownership are being bandied about on social media in South Africa, where expropriation without compensation is a trending topic. We get some perspective from Institute of Race Relations (IRR) fellow Gabriel Crouse who says: “…if you want to know what could the government confirm in terms of racial ownership…it could only confirm 22% of land owned by white people.” He warns: “Black South Africans literally have the most to lose because Black South Africans have the most land in terms of urban land and almost certainly the most land by value, particularly if you’re looking at residential land, which is the most valuable land in the country.” As for US President Donald Trump’s refugee offer to Afrikaners, he says: “…the State Department would have done much better to say that all South Africans are at risk, that all South Africans stand to gain from strong property rights and lose from weak property rights, and not to single out one group, which they can’t even define, we suspect, for special refugee benefits.” Meanwhile, IRR Legal, which Crouse leads, is heading to court. “Personally, I think we’re going to win.”
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Edited transcript of the interview ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Chris Steyn (00:01.462)
Incorrect figures on land ownership are being bandied about on social media in South Africa, where expropriation without compensation is a trending topic. We get the correct figures from Institute of Race Relations fellow Gabriel Crouse. Welcome, Gabriel.
GD Crouse (00:20.851)
Hi, thank you, Chris.
Chris Steyn (00:22.498)
Let’s start with farmland. What percentage of South Africa’s land is farmland?
GD Crouse (00:30.751)
Already, that’s a somewhat difficult question to answer straightforwardly because the definition of farmland is elastic. If you define farmland as productive, actively used, highly fertile farmland, then it’s a relatively small portion.
But the way that the government defined farmland when it was doing its land audit in 2017, which is the most extensive analysis to try and answer this question; it found that there was over 100 million hectares of farmland in South Africa and 122 million hectares of land in general in South Africa.
Chris Steyn (01:10.67)
What percentage of that farmland is currently in black hands?
GD Crouse (01:17.927)
That is probably the hardest question to answer. Individually owned farmland recorded in possession of Black people was roughly one and a half percent of that total in the 2017 audit. But that doesn’t include any farmland that is owned, for example, through trusts or community property associations.
Just to focus on community property associations for a second. That covers three and a half million hectares of land. And that’s mainly quite attractive land on the eastern wet side of the country that was given to, or let’s rather say, because it’s more correct, returned to black people who’d been dispossessed during Apartheid. And the CPA is a legal mechanism by which people own that land. So we know that that’s three and a half million hectares which is more than double the little 1%, 1.5% owned by individuals. But that was not included as counting as being in black hands, although everyone who received a CPA benefit through the land reform programme was black. If we keep going, you can count things like Ingonyama Trust land, if that counts as being in black hands, you’ve got a sizable amount there. If you have government land that has been taken or held, and not yet given fully to Black people, but instead the government’s holding it as a custodian. We have state-owned land at roughly a third of total land. So that’s over 30 million hectares and already more than the amount owned by white people, but I’m preempting your question there.
Chris Steyn (03:06.03)
Okay, so what percentage of farmland is then left in white hands?
GD Crouse (03:16.575)
So the short answer is that the survey found that 21.8% of all the land is owned by white people. So that’s a fifth, 21, 22%. Let’s say 22%. That is also not a complete answer because it doesn’t include companies or trusts, and some companies and some trusts are owned by white people. But if you want to know what could the government confirm in terms of racial ownership…
GD Crouse (03:46.577)
…it could only confirm 22% of land owned by white people. And that’s very important. I don’t know about social media. I don’t track it so well, but I read CNN, its news blog, and I watch its footage. And CNN was claiming that whites own two thirds or three quarters of the farmland in South Africa. That is not true. They referred as their source to this 2017 survey.
GD Crouse (04:15.219)
This 2017 survey shows that white people own at least 22% of the land. It doesn’t show that white people own two-thirds or three-quarters of the land. It’s disingenuous to say the latter. It requires ignoring all the state-owned land, all the trust-owned land, all the CPA-owned land, et cetera, and all the unregistered land. I mean, let’s not forget that 6% of the total surface area of South Africa… is not even registered by the state because it’s former so-called Bantustan land, in Limpopo, in the eastern Cape.
GD Crouse (04:44.957)
And the government hasn’t bothered to go about and complete its duty to register that land so that freehold title can be issued.
Chris Steyn (04:51.726)
Okay, so as for the rest of the land, apart from the farmland, how can we divide the ownership there?
GD Crouse (05:03.807)
So, in that audit, they look at sectional title, for example, which is obviously a fractional thing. if you think about it, sectional title is quite an important way to think about how South Africa’s geographically changed. Predominantly, sectional title is held in cases where you have dense urban residential areas and people have a flat and they own that flat and they own the sectional title. So during Apartheid, sectional title was 100% white owned, practically speaking, because everyone else was banned from living in the kinds of areas where you’d have sectional title. So it’s very important and completely overlooked that the 2017 Land Audit focused on race and sectional title. And there it was much more extensive, because you don’t have nearly as much distracting stuff with CPAs or whatever. And it found that white people own, there were 180,000 sectional title owners and 95,000 of them were white. And in terms of surface area, again, it is roughly the case that whites own half of the sectional titles. So, that’s, you know, half of the whole story has changed in terms of its racial look.
If you look at residential land, homes, that is the most important form of real estate in the country by value. And there, there isn’t, unfortunately, a clear cut on to no one’s done the survey directly to sort of do the racial look-up of every home in the country and who owns it.
But we do know that through the, if you ask people, do you own your home and is it fully paid off? The number of black South Africans who respond yes to that answer is roughly 10 times the number of white South Africans. And we also know that when, and part of that is because of RDP, you know, that question I want to say, the Institute of Racial Relations published that result year in and year out in its annual survey. It should come with a footnote, which is that sometimes people think that they have full ownership of the RDP house. They don’t think of themselves as needing to pay it off to the bank because they don’t. But they don’t actually have full ownership because they haven’t been given the title deed. They just perceive that they should have full ownership and so answer in that way. So you’ve got to take that question to the pinch of salt.I think it does point to the fact that there are millions of South Africans…
GD Crouse (07:26.455)
…on state-owned land who have been denied getting title deed.
But furthermore, if you ask StatsSA, if you go to StatsSA, StatsSA asks people regularly, how much is your home worth? And there are different categories of value. The highest category of value is three million Rand. Now, Chris, I think you and I can agree that if you own a three million Rand house, you are comfortably middle class. Of course, it’d be nicer to have a 30 million Rand house or a 300 million Rand mansion in Clifton, by three million is comfy.
A minority of the respondents who say yes to that answer are white. That is a huge change in the middle class. And when we look at data coming out of banks, when we look at data coming out of Treasury, when we look at a range of other data points, we see that the long and the short of this is the Expropriation Act is an attack on property rights, and Black South Africans literally have the most to lose because Black South Africans have the most land in terms of urban land and almost certainly the most land by value, particularly if you’re looking at residential land, which is the most valuable land in the country.
That is not what is explicitly targeted by this act, but this act is vague in its provisions of null compensation. It leaves an open list. It also says that if the land is unused, if anyone is not in their home for some unknown period of time and hasn’t sublet it to Airbnb it out or whatever. And it turns out that they want to sell that home for a profit, which is one of the provisions in 1231 of the Expropriation Act, then an expropriating authority can expropriate it for more compensation. That is distressing to all South Africans. And the notion that one race or another is particularly affected should be treated with extreme caution when you consider how much everyone has to lose. And if you consider that the makeup of ownership has changed significantly more than most commentators are willing to acknowledge around this issue.
Chris Steyn (09:26.478)
What do you make of US President Donald Trump’s reaction to the signing of this act?
GD Crouse (09:35.155)
We think that you have to analyse it in two parts. The first part is positive. South Africa’s property rights have been under attack. The attempted constitutional amendment, the signing of this act and international attention is vital in order to focus the mind and get people to deal with this appropriately.
We also have drawn attention repeatedly, including in the Wall Street Journal before this was signed, to the fact that OGOA is a law. This trade bargaining situation that we’re in. AGOA is a law. And the law says you can only be part of a GOA if you protect or are going towards protecting property rights. So if you’re reversing protection of property rights, you are disqualified by law from being in AGOA. So we think that this is an opening salvo in warning South Africa about its AGOA status. As long as the Constitution’s around, maybe it protects us from the worst of this act, it should. But if no compensation or below market value compensations occur, South Africa will be ejected and that’ll add more economic harm. So that’s a good side.
The bad side is the following. And it’s broken down into two points. One is, unfortunately, the US is weakening its soft power position around the world. It’s cutting aid globally. And anyone who studied any political science, that’s what I focused in, will know that if you’ve got less carrots, if you’ve got less goodies to give out, it’s less of a punishment to say we’re not giving you the goodies; they’re not giving away the goodies anyway. So the cut to aid is largely symbolic. And it’s even more symbolic when you consider the PEPFAR has been exempted from the aid cut. So, in real terms, the US is actually giving exactly the kind of important aid that it always was giving.
The second side of the second part now, the critical part, is that Trump single out Afrikaners. We don’t believe that the US administration is able to identify what an Afrikaner is. There are many South Africans who think that an Afrikaner is someone who adheres to the Afrikaans culture, which is to do with language, cuisine, dress, and so that person can be of any race. By contrast, we’ve heard the leadership of Orania say that even if a black or coloured person was adopted into an Afrikaans family from birth, from just after birth, and so grew up fully embedded in that culture, they would still not be an Afrikaner because an Afrikaner is defined strictly by race.
GD Crouse (11:59.731)
Not all white people are Afrikaans, but it is a prerequisite to be Afrikaans that you must be white.
Now, which definition is the US going to use when it is deciding which refugees are going to be accepted? We don’t know. We’re asking that question to the US State Department, and we’re very worried that the answer they’re going to give is that, we want to reinforce this racial.
The other part of singling out Afrikaners is that we think it’s extremely unfortunate to establish this narrative that only one particular group’s property rights are under threat here. That is a false narrative. The truth is everyone’s property rights are under threat.
I’m sorry I’m going on here, but a lot of people that I’ve said this to think I’m trying to just be clever. Like, no, don’t we actually know it’s really white guys whose land people want to take? That is really the target. But let me tell you about the CPA Amendment Act. I mentioned CPAs earlier, these three million hectares of land owned by half a million Black people. The CPA Amendment Act last year said that those black people are no longer allowed to sell their land, lease their land, mortgage their land, or in any way encumber their land without the consent of a registrar coming out of the Department of Rural Development Land Reform. It’s been months. That registrar doesn’t exist. That means all of those people’s rights to sell their property, lease their property, mortgage their property has been annihilated. Those are all black people, land reform beneficiaries whose property rights have been eviscerated.
It is not an academic point to make that everyone of the people of all races are under attack here. Black people are certainly not exempt from the predations of this attempt to eviscerate section 25 of the Bill of Rights.
And all South Africans need to stand together and try and defend that clause in our Bill of Rights to say we all, if you own something, deserve to be protected by the state, not abused by the state.
So we think that the State Department would have done much better to say that all South Africans are at risk, that all South Africans stand to gain from strong property rights and lose from weak property rights, and not to single out one group, which they can’t even define, we suspect, for special refugee benefits.
Chris Steyn (14:05.172)
As things stand now, how do you see this playing out for South Africa and what do you expect from the government?
GD Crouse (14:13.649)
I think that the government is going to continue to be in two minds. On the one hand, have Ramaphosa’s signature policy. The president, the first thing that he did when he was elected leader of the ANC was to promise expropriation without compensation. And he has pushed to deliver that.
There are going to be cases that are tested in the court. The DA has launched its application. IRR Legal, which I lead, is launching its application. Personally, I think we’re going to win. A lot of people think we’re going to lose. I’m going there to win because I believe in our courts, I believe in our constitution, and I think we’ve got what it takes.
But if we watch expropriations happen in the meantime while that’s being decided, I think it’s going to be distressing.
Key thing to watch in terms of practicals is what Minister Dean MacPherson does at the Department of Public Works. We think that there are regulations that can be drawn up that really do make it for now quite challenging to undermine property rights and relatively easier to defend property rights and to do so within the law and within the constitution. But how long is Macpherson going to be able to hold into that position? Only as long as the GNU holds together. How long is that going to be? 2026. see NHI actually becomes expensive by law. The bargaining that the DA is talking about makes no sense to me. If you read the letter of the law, it has to get very expensive next year unless you repeal the act or parts of it. Also, there’ll be internal local government elections that is going to turn up the campaigning heat and make it very hard for the GNU to stick together.
And thirdly, after 2026 comes 2027. The very exciting thing about 2027 is that that is when the ANC has its next internal election. Ramaphosa is bound to try and stand for a third term, just as Zuma did, just as Mbeki did, and just as they failed. It is at least plausible that he will fail and be replaced by someone who will pursue the EWC agenda, the Nil Compensation Agenda, in the assistance of the MK and the EFF. If someone replaces Ramaphosa, who no longer…
GD Crouse (16:24.883)
…finds the GNU to be a workable solution, who thinks that he has been too cozy with those parties. You can expect a change there. And that would, I think, really bring forward the worst consequences that this law allows for. At that point, the only thing we have to fall back on is the Constitution and the Constitutional Court’s interpretation thereof. We hope that it’s right. But if it’s not, South Africa is in very deep trouble, indeed.
Chris Steyn (16:51.404)
Thank you. That was the Institute of Race Relations fellow Gabriel Crouse speaking to BizNews and I’m Chris Steyn.
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