The second-largest partner in South Africa’s unity government said Monday it had launched a court bid to annul an “unconstitutional” land expropriation act that has sparked a major spat with US President Donald Trump.
President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a bill last month that stipulates the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest.
Trump, whose ally Elon Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid, alleges the law allows land to be seized from white farmers and has issued an order to freeze aid to South Africa.
Land ownership remains a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid. It is a legacy of a policy of expropriating land from the black population that endured during apartheid and the colonial period before it.
“The DA has filed papers in the High Court to challenge the recently signed Expropriation Act, because the Act is unconstitutional, both substantively and procedurally,” the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s only white-led party, said in a statement.
“The Act is vague and contradictory in several clauses,” the pro-business DA added.
Ramaphosa’s African National Congress failed to win enough votes in elections last May to govern alone, a first since the party took power in 1994 and ended decades of white-minority apartheid rule.
It was forced into an uneasy coalition with the former opposition DA, which heads six ministries, and eight other parties.
The new law allows the government, as a matter of public interest, to decide on expropriations without compensation but only in certain exceptional circumstances where it would be “just and equitable”.
The act replaces a 1975 apartheid-era law to align it with the post-apartheid constitution.
It has fuelled fears of a similar scenario as in Zimbabwe in the 2000s when thousands of white farmers were stripped of their land.
White South Africans make up around seven percent of the population, according to data from 2022.
South Africa on Saturday condemned a “campaign of misinformation” after Trump claimed the law would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.
By Agencies
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