December 22, 2013 Posted by Peter Meakin under Editorials
Julius Seizure, AKA Julius Malema, scorns Madiba’s economic legacy (Cape Times, 17 Dec). Yet on the twentieth anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize award to Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk they could also have shared the Laureate for Economics (conferred by Sweden’s Riks Bank in memory of Alfred Nobel who left no money for economics or mathematics). This would be in recognition of their astonishing Constitutional property rights pact in Sec 25.5: “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis.”
This is the blue print for digging out poverty, root and branch. In one sentence it ends the landless, proletarian life-style of dependency on wage contracts. Those minimum wage takings have wreaked their wretched toll in South Africa’s rusty corrugated iron suburbs where five million unemployed are denied productive land and the self-employed jobs it will offer. That does not count the six million others who live in dangerous and degrading urban hell-holes, grasping at delivery of this or that service, when in 1994 their leaders were signing off on hectares not lavatories.
And who on earth gave permission for land to stay fallow, for years on end There is not a town planning scheme in the world which does not go on and on about precisely what owners can do to land, never what they cannot.
Mr Malema nevertheless wants to nationalise land without compensation. True to form that is ill-considered because if he would instead promise to gradually nationalise not land, but land rents, and simultaneously privatise wages, salaries, profit, interest, capital gains and consumption by retiring income taxes and vat, South Africa would become a tax haven. Another Mandela and FW de Klerk landed victory which trumps the Freedom Charter.
Peter Meakin
Registered Property Valuer; Member - SA Institute of Valuers; Chairman - SACPRIF Management Committee 4, Violet Rd, Claremont 7708 South Africa T 021 683 4346 F 086 603 4349 C 082 977 4429
Labels: LAND REFORM, SOUTH AFRICA
posted by MrK @ 6:02 PM
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