International Pressure: Key to Saving South Africa from Socialist Collapse

South Africa's New Expropriation Act: A Marxist-Leninist Power Play

On 23 January 2025, the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, signed the new Expropriation Act into law. Last year, Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress (ANC) lost its first general election since 1994, necessitating the formation of a coalition government.

This has not dissuaded the Marxist-Leninist ANC from grasping at authoritarian straws in an attempt to consolidate as much power in the state as it can to place it in a position to dish out more largesse in exchange for support.

The confiscatory designs of the South African government have drawn international attention over recent years, especially when the government was still seeking to amend the country’s constitution to revoke the unqualified right to compensation that property owners have when their property is expropriated. This attempted amendment failed in November 2021, but the ANC and its Government of National Unity (GNU) have since decided that ordinary legislation may be used to achieve the same end.

“Nil compensation”

The Expropriation Act therefore provides that the state may “expropriate” property for “nil compensation.” Various things are noteworthy about this.

The institution of “expropriation,” since Hugo Grotius first introduced it centuries ago, necessarily includes the payment of compensation. “Expropriation without compensation” is a contradiction in terms, which is why leftist legal academics in South Africa have advised the government to change the terminology to expropriation for “nil compensation.”

The government has managed to convince large numbers of people that “nil compensation” expropriations are only possible under limited, listed circumstances (like “abandoned” property, and so forth), but this is a lie. The list in the Act is not a closed list, but an open one, meaning those items included in it are mere examples of when property may be confiscated without compensation. Other circumstances “in the public interest” may be determined by government on the fly.

The Expropriation Act is also not only about compensation. It makes expropriation in general much easier for the government to engage in.

To take one example, now even in “normal” cases where an amount of compensation is to be paid, the Act forces owners to hand the property over to government before they have been paid in full. To add insult to injury, the property must also be handed over even if the owner is challenging the legality of the expropriation in court. By doing this, the state knows it can impoverish even formerly wealthy property owners before they have even had a chance to begin litigation.

Crucially, while much of the rhetoric around this phenomenon is related to “land” and therefore “farms,” the Act is a general expropriation and therefore includes (at least) all fixed property.

International pressure

As a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the ANC relies on a “balance of forces” strategy to determine the speed at which it implements its agenda. When there is sufficient pushback, it stands back and waits for a better opportunity. Only when the balance of forces is advantageous does it press its advantage.

The key thing to note here is that the ANC tends to have far lesser regard for domestic pressure than foreign pressure. Since the end of apartheid, the ANC has placed a premium on its international reputation and prestige as the “Party of Nelson Mandela.”

More than a concerted campaign by civic groups inside South Africa, a single tweet by Donald Trump, or a statement in the House of Commons makes the government and ANC stop and take notice.

The Trump-tweet strategy has been tried before and sparked an important dialogue, but this time South Africa needs more help. A sustained campaign of pressure by foreign groups, politicians, and governments is crucial until the ANC finally and decisively abandons any plans to confiscate private property.

Of course, South Africa is not the responsibility of the international community. Civil society here will do everything within its reasonable power to fight against this attack on basic freedom. But just like the international community played a significant – often but not always detrimental – role in how South Africa turned out in the 1990s, it can now fix some of the damage, and entrench some of the good, it did back then.

Not a racial issue

It is important for international friends of South Africa’s property owners to not present this as “the black majority versus a white landed minority.”

There are large numbers of sensible black South Africans who understand how destructive it is to abandon secure property rights, and there are white South Africans among the radical left who think that a Great Redistribution is the best way for them to atone for the sins of their forebears. And black property owners’ assets are in just as much jeopardy.

This is, in other words, not primarily a racial issue, but an ideological issue wherein socialists are desperate to gather as much state power as they possibly can and use it to rent-seek and further entrench themselves in power.

The vibey racial dimension is notable, of course, since when it speaks to domestic audiences the ANC leans into it. When Ramaphosa speaks to foreign audiences, naturally, he pretends that this is nothing more than post-apartheid South Africa innocently and in considered fashion amending old and adopting new laws.

But despite the racialised rhetoric, this is not black versus white. It is totalitarianism versus liberty.

To the international left, in the 1990s, South Africa represented a significant last-ditch effort to show that “some kind of socialism” can in fact work after the Soviet Union collapsed and China turned to a market economy. American law professors, foremost among them Karl Klare, promoted the ideology of “transformative constitutionalism” that created the notion among jurists, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that South Africa’s one of the most “progressive” constitutions worldwide. This laid the foundation for disrespecting the sanctity of property rights in particular, despite the Constitution’s strong textual protections.

Even today, the global left and rent-seekers are welcomed into South Africa to assist the local socialists to implement their agenda. And while there are notable examples of sensible classical liberals and conservatives around the world lending a voice to sanity in South Africa, the relationship is asymmetric. If these voices could match the influence of the Western and Eastern left here, we would be in a considerably better position.

The lies to be told

As during previous rounds of the property debate in South Africa, the South African government will try to distort the truth about what’s going on over the next few weeks and months, specifically to the international community.

As above, it will claim that there is no “expropriation without compensation” – the Constitution requires “just and equitable compensation” and that is what the new law also requires. And, following from that, it will submit that the entire process will be done legally and orderly, and in a way that does not threaten food security or foreign investment.

These are both rhetorical and linguistic tricks.

Leftist legal academics have done much work over the past few years to construct an elaborate (and bewildering) argument that “nil compensation” is an “amount” of compensation that government may “pay” when expropriating property.

Thus, the “just and equitable compensation” amount is $0.

In other words, it is not “without compensation” – there is compensation, but to the amount of nil. Dare I elaborate on the euphemistic abuse of plain constitutional language that this is?

The second appeal, to “order” and “law,” is equally problematic. The expropriation without compensation of Jewish property before the Holocaust, and expropriation of property in the Soviet Union and Venezuela were all also done “legally.” And the expropriations in Zimbabwe were retroactively legalised.

In 2015, the South African government adopted the euphemistically named “Protection of Investment Act” which made foreign property in South Africa liable to the same confiscatory designs as the property of locals. This occurred alongside the termination of various bilateral investment treaties, meaning foreign investments in South Africa legally may have no special protection.

Another lie – the now tired appeal to “social justice” – will also be wheeled out: that this is nothing but a lawful mechanism to ensure that the “landless” black South African majority also gains access to property.

In terms of South Africa’s State Land Lease and Disposal Policy, however, the government has made it clear that it – the state – will own land, and lease it out to civilians to utilise.

ANC land reform policy has never been about redistribution of land from a minority to the majority, but about redistributing property from the people to the state. Unsurprisingly, such property often lies fallow and does not yield the same agricultural outputs as when it was privately owned.

Expropriation as punishment and naked state power

The ANC has weaponised the institution of expropriation that is known throughout the world by this and other names like “eminent domain” or “compulsory purchase.”

In the rest of the world, expropriation is used – sparingly – not as a tool of punishment, but as one of social improvement. Governments understand that those people whose properties are being expropriated are not blameworthy for anything, otherwise they would have been dealt with via criminal or tort law.

Instead, they simply and coincidentally happen to own property the state requires. That is why it is not merely market-based compensation that is paid when this property is taken, but more than market value (so-called solatium) to compensate the owners for the disruption and inconvenience.

In South Africa, however, the new Expropriation Act now explicitly excludes solatium, and the rhetoric from ANC politicians is that expropriation will be used to bring about “justice” and address the “original sin” of colonialism.

Whereas in the legal realm justice is to be secured through criminal law, the ANC has decided that because it (obviously) cannot prove, according to the ordinary rules of evidence and due process, that all landowners somehow possess ill-begotten property, it will take the easy road of simply “expropriating” the property without further ado. It will legally punish landowners – for the crime of being landowners – using a neutral, non-penal area of law.

Leave socialism in the dustbin of history

The protection of private property and the payment of market-based compensation when it is expropriated is a necessary ingredient for prosperity, especially on a fraught continent like Africa. Sapping South Africa of property rights can only yield another Zimbabwe or Venezuela.

History has desperately tried to teach us all this lesson.

With their property secure, people are incentivised to invest in and improve their assets to increase their own wealth and thereby grow the economy. This sparks economic activity, which in turn drives general growth, job creation, and meets consumer demands. For a developing economy like South Africa, attracting capital and investment, both foreign and domestic, is vital.

But private property also serves a purpose beyond individual liberty. It serves the community and democracy itself. Without a proprietary foundation, “citizenship” is but a word. A landed citizenry independent of the political elite is necessary to ensure the masses are not necessarily dependent on state largesse or handouts, and the ANC knows this. Total state dependency is its long-term goal, and the people of South Africa its intended serfs.

If ever in South Africa’s post-apartheid story sensible people from around the world took notice of this country’s impending plight, it should be now.

Martin van Staden

Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa