Former president Kgalema Motlanthe says the expropriation of land without compensation will never happen in South Africa.
He was addressing a property summit in Sandton, north of Johannesburg on Friday night.
Motlanthe spoke about the challenges of land restitution, reform, redistribution and security of tenure covered in a High Level Panel, which he led, and subsequently compiled a report.
He also criticised Parliament’s response to the report, which he said explained that the Constitution was clear on the expropriation of land without compensation.
“Nonetheless, parliamentarians in their wisdom decided that actually, this Section 25 is not explicit enough. So they want to amend it to make it explicitly clear that there shall be expropriation without compensation. That’s not going to happen in a hundred years’ time, I can assure you that,” says Motlanthe.
Motlanthe says he’s convinced that Parliamentarians have not read his 2017 report on land reform.
“Even crafted a draft law of general application, we called it indicative law. We said you must pass this law and it looks as follows but the report was submitted, very few people read it in Parliament. It wasn’t read at all,” says Motlanthe.
