Hundreds of residents from areas in and around Mthatha in the Eastern Cape have come in their numbers in the first session of public hearings on land expropriation without compensation in the province.
The public hearings have started at the Umtata Town Hall in the OR Tambo District on Monday and will move to Queenstown on Wednesday.
A delegation from Parliament’s Committee on Constitution Review is conducting the hearings in four districts.
Traditional leaders, politicians, commercial farmers and communities formed a long queue as they registered to get into the packed city hall. Most feel that the land should not be in state hands.
A participant Thembinkosi Butshinga says traditional leaders have an important role to play. “The custodian of the land is the traditional authorities or the traditional leaders but the government if they want to do something in the land they must go to the kings or to the chiefs and then he can ask that request because the land remains to the traditional leaders once and for all”.
A commercial farmer, Gerrie Foster, is of the view that the government can expropriate with compensation without amending the constitution.
“I’ve got no problem with being party to the solution of the land distribution problems because we have acknowledged that the apartheid regime was wrong in the way that they expropriated land from the original traditional owners. So when it comes to redistribution I would like to be part of that, I’d like to be of assistance in redistribution program but I don’t believe that the few land owners that are there now who benefited from the apartheid should be the ones that are taxed or disowned. I believe that the government has, in the current constitution has the ability to expropriate land with compensation fair and just.”
WATCH | Public hearings on land move to the Eastern Cape
The Public hearings will this week move to the Eastern Cape and Gauteng.
The committee which split into two groups has already held public hearings in six provinces so far. The other group of the committee will only resume the Gauteng leg of public hearings on Thursday at the Westonaria Civic Centre in the West Rand District Municipality.
This week’s hearings in Eastern Cape and Gauteng will have brought the number of provinces where public hearings have been conducted to eight.
The committee is currently possibly reviewing section 25 of the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation.
The entire committee will hold the last provincial public hearings in the Western Cape next week. They will end in the Cape Metro on the Saturday the 4th of August.
