Politics
In a move that it says will address the injustice imposed by the white-minority rule, South Africa’s government approved a bill, which allows it to expropriate land in the public interest. Even after two decades since apartheid ended, most of the country’s land is owned by Whites. The opposition Democratic Alliance opposed the bill while President Jacob Zuma assured that the land distribution will be carried out within the framework of the law.
The governing Africa National Congress (A.N.C.) described the bill as a “historic” step in bringing justice to “dispossessed” South Africans, notes the BBC. After the end of apartheid era, the A.N.C. has been able to redistribute only 10 percent of the land owned by Whites, falling well short of a 30 percent mark it had targeted.
Analysts believe that the bill doesn’t mean that the government will follow its neighbor Zimbabwe, where authorities carried out violent land grabs to redistribute white-owned farms to landless blacks, writes Al Jazeera. The land expropriation bill, which went through amendments before being passed by the national assembly in February, needs to be signed by Zuma before it becomes a law.
The move comes at a time when a majority of commercial and small-scale producers in the country are hit by the worst drought in at least a century.
