Agri Eastern Cape will use whatever legal recourse it can to ensure parliament does not amend section 25 of the constitution.
This is after parliament’s joint constitutional review committee recommended the property section of the constitution be changed to expedite expropriation of land without compensation on Thursday.
Agri EC president Doug Stern said it had always believed there was enough merit in the constitution for the government and it was using the proposed amendment as a means to hide its inefficiencies and inability to implement its own policies.
“We’ve got to wait for the exact wording to see how we’ll counter it, but we will throw everything at it because we believe it is not in the interest of this economy and it could have devastating effects on personal rights to own any property of any kind.
“People mustn’t think it’s only related to farming.
“It’s related to all assets, which depends on how they come out with the wording,” Stern said.
Stern said he believed what was happening was unconstitutional.
“We will not tolerate it, it is unnecessary and with the correct implementation they could’ve used the bill as it is,” Stern said.
He added that there had been enough interaction with international investors to know that they would fight the amending of the constitution.
Earlier this year, the constitutional review committee held 34 land hearings throughout the country and of those, according to ANC MP and former committee co-chair Vincent Smith, 90% of people who attended were in favour of amending the constitution.
On Thursday, Smith said changing the land expropriation law would not happen before the 2019 general elections.
Kouga local municipality Farm Workers Re-Union chair Buyelwa Kota said she was extremely happy about the development because it was one step closer to people getting land.
Kota, a farm worker, said: “People here want to farm, they want to own land, but a lot of land in Kouga is already owned by white farmers and we’re left out.
“This is good because it means we’re going to get land from the government and farm as we’ve been fighting with this municipality for a long time to get commonage land.”