The ruling African National Congress (ANC) plans to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation, as most of it is still owned by members of the white minority.
The ANC announced the plans, backed off them but now they are back on again, this time with IMF Backing Provided it’s ‘Rules Based’.
>The debate erupted again last week when U.S. President Donald Trump said he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South African “land and farm seizures” and the “killing of farmers”. South Africa accused Trump of stoking racial divisions.
>The IMF Fund’s senior resident representative in South Africa Montfort Mlachila told Reuters “We are in full support of the need to undertake land reforms in order to address the issues of inequality.”
Land Reform?
We are not talking about land reform, we are talking about a land grab theft.
The ANC announced the plan, backed off and now it appears the plan is back on, with support from the IMF.
IMF Financial Support
>Mlachila said South Africa was not expected to seek IMF financial support due to its deep domestic financial markets and access to international markets for financing its balance of payments and fiscal deficits.
>“We really don’t see much need for recourse to financing from the IMF,” Mlachila said.
If there is human and capital flight after this theft, South Africa will indeed be headed for IMF support.
Recall that the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe began with a land grab in the interest of “fairness”.
In the sake of “fairness” the Zimbabwe currency went to zero, for everybody.
Trump’s Controversial Tweet
Counter Claim
NPR: The U.S. Embassy cited a recent report by AgriSA, a nonprofit industry group that represents 70,000 commercial farmers, that estimated that there were 47 farm murders from 2017 to 2018, fewer than at any time in the past 19 years. Police records documented 74 farm murders out of a total of 19,016 total murders in South Africa between April 2016 and March 2017.
Customers Must Honor Home loan Payments even if Land is Seized
Nedbank says Customers Must Honor Home loan Payments even if Land is Seized.
>A South African bank has sparked a firestorm of criticism after informing customers they would still have to pay off their mortgage even if their property is seized by the government.
>In an email circulating on social media, an official from Nedbank — one of the country’s big five banks — informed the customer that “bond payments remain due” regardless of any expropriation, “with or without compensation”.
>A Nedbank spokesman said clients were urged to “be patient as this process unfolds”. “Until there’s further clarity on this process, it is business as usual at Nedbank,” he said.
>It comes as tensions reach fever pitch after Donald Trump’s controversial comments last week on the racially charged issue of land redistribution sparked an international incident and accusations the US President was peddling a “white supremacist” conspiracy theory.
>Civil rights group Afriforum, which represents the white Afrikaner minority, alleges that white farmers are being targeted in a brutal campaign of politically motivated farm attacks.
>The exact numbers of people killed in such attacks is disputed. The AgriSA union representing commercial farmers says the number was 47 last year, Afriforum says the real number is 84.
Bottom Line
There are a lot of charges and suppositions on both sides that obscure one simple point: One does not fix injustice with more injustice.
Any plan to confiscate land in the name of “justice” is not just and is bound to fail.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
As a South African I can say this is hugely complex, but agree with the sentiment that expropriation of land without compensation is a mine field which promises only a limited solution to a seemingly limitless problem.
Some lists put us as the most economically unequal country in the world. Certainly government has to do something to bring balance in our distribution of wealth! For 25 years since we became a democracy, our affirmative action programmes, although the most aggressive in the world, have done precious little to right the ship. This is why something so objectively unreasonable is given weight in the constitutional court.
I believe it’s not the way to go. There is too much attention to vast tracts of land and not enough placed on developing micro enterprises. My company umsizi.co.za is rolling out broad-based livelihoods programmes empowering people to productively utilise whatever small tracts of land they already have, down to a couple of square metres. We work with corporates and government, and thankfully it is starting to attract the right kinds of attention.
In any case, we will keep our eyes on the land policies and continue to voice our opinion over each draft of the proposed bill to hopefully steer the legislature.
Study Rhodesia. In the end, the Rhodesians were betrayed by Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young who were opposed to any role in a Zimbabwe government by whites. Who wanted Mugabe? The Russians and the Chinese. And apparently the rest of the world. Of course, the Rhodesians were also their own worst enemy by not allowing the more sympathetic African Rhodesians to share power and land. It did not take long after the end of the bush war for the tribal killings to begin, with Mugabe’s Shona tribe eliminating 30,000 Ndebele. Soon after, native Zimbabweans were begging for the whites to remain or come back after the complete breakdown of normal governmental administration, schools, hospitals, road and bridge maintenance, the currency (you can actually purchase a 100 Trillion Dollar Zim note as a remembrance of that inflation).
SA apartheid was a completely different set of circumstances than Rhodesia, with brutality and deprivation being the order of the day.
I suspect that eventually we will discover that China is backing the SA government in their own quest for control of African natural resources and the eventual extension of their OBOR. They will have their hands full dealing with the tribal hatred and distrust imbedded in Africa.
There is nothing Trump can do about the internal affairs of SA, other than to offer the SA farmers political asylum and economic opportunity in the US.
Let the Africans continue to learn their lessons the hard way. The world will also continue to bail them out.
NedBank has to be very afraid of defaults. I imagine NedBank will not continue to do business in South Africa with such political risks to investments.
Funny how no one thinks the whites will not organize, arm and fight. It is not even considered.
Not many places for white refugees to go to anymore.
Eventually, better to fight when you have a slim chance of winning than to be exterminated.
2banana – Agree. The common thinking seems to be whites will roll over in South Africa. Sure, take our land. Oh, you want us to pay a mortgage on it even though we don’t own it? Of course. We’d love to!
And that seems to make the most sense in a world where whiteness now is “bad,” so simply by virtue of being white, you owe us.
If a full-on military action were to occur, the country would still end up being destroyed. So that seems like the worst course, but what path the pathetic SA African government is putting the country on.
But, I could be wrong. Listen to or read the transcript of Obama’s recent speech there. Everything is beautiful.
“We are not talking about land reform, we are talking about a land grab theft.”
… which is how white people the land in the first place. Ultimately, land belongs to whoever can kick the other guy off it.
You are wrong. White people came to nearly an empty land and built a country. Blacks moved there in search of economic opportunities after South Africa was built.
Great argument for building that wall though.
Bulllshit.
You do realize that whites have been building a country in South Africa since 1498? Or did you just try to cherry pick something 400 years LATER because your meme is crashing all around you?
BTW – The Zulus came to South Africa in the 1600s displacing the Bantu Tribe. So really, by your logic, Zulus should be stripped of their land and it be given to the Bantus.
“The history of European settlement in South Africa started in 1652 with the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) under Jan van Riebeeck.[6] Despite the preponderance of officials and colonists from the Netherlands, there were also a number of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at home and German soldiers or sailors returning from service in Asia.[7] The colony remained under Dutch rule for two more centuries, after which it was annexed by Great Britain around 1806.[8] At that time, South Africa was home to about 26,000 people of European descent, a relative majority of whom were still of Dutch origin.[8] However, beginning in 1818 thousands of British immigrants arrived in the growing Cape Colony, looking to join the local workforce or settle directly on the frontier.[8] About a fifth of the Cape’s original Dutch-speaking white population migrated eastwards during the Great Trek in the 1830s and established their own autonomous Boer republics further inland.[9] Nevertheless, the population of European origin continued increasing in the Cape as a result of immigration, and by 1865 had reached 181,592 people.[10] Between 1880 and 1910, there was an influx of Eastern Europeans of various nationalities, especially a large Jewish community from the Baltic region, particularly Lithuania.”
You need to be an empire to get away with land theft. Hard to deny USA stole its land from the Natives Indians, and from Mexico in the west at point of a gun. Now they are called illegal immigrants.
Gliderdude – Again, relitigating the past …
And your sentence re: illegal immigrants makes no sense. Native American Indians are not illegal immigrants.
Look up the definition of illegal immigrant.
But I’m sensing you’re an Open Borders person and thinks “no one is illegal.” Wa, wa, wa.
“Hard to deny USA stole its land from the Natives Indians, and from Mexico in the west at point of a gun. Now they are called illegal immigrants.”
….the world was a very different place when the colonists
first hit the Americas 500+ yrs ago. There were really no well defined “nation states”, no defined borders, the entire world had not been explored by any one people. Liberals especially love to talk about things that happened hundreds of years ago when the world was a very, very, very different place in many ways, and act like they happened yesterday. Today we have well defined borders, laws, nation states, etc… This is apples and oranges.
“there were really no well defined “nation states”, no defined borders, the entire world had not been explored by any one people”
No doubt the natives here fought over land, but knew their borders, and when they were attacking another’s turf. What was difference with the European wars and shifting borders? If one justifies taking land by saying “those savages had no land deeds (catch-22: as recognized within invader’s system)” that gives carte blanche for manifest destiny by any foriegner.
At the end of the day essentially all land was acquired by force or retained by force. Ownership of land as defined by an invader, will always favor the invader. It’s a might makes right reality rather than the moral virtue the victor makes it out to be.
If periodically walking over land constituted some legitimate claim to “ownership” then you should claim your local 7/11 or McDonalds.
Most Indians were primitive savages who “stole” land from each other through warfare before the white man ever came along.
More like a person setting up camp on a Rancher’s land declaring nobody is living here! Then tells friends about this great free land over here. When the Rancher tries to chase the group off his land away they fight and his family is mostly wiped out. The new owners issue land deeds to themselves and force the lone survivor into a tiny section of the worst land, and periodically move the survivor as suits their needs.
Zardoz – Your sort of ignorant and racist thinking is why it looks like SA will end up in the shitter. You have hundreds of years in that area of blacks killing blacks, blacks killing whites and whites killing blacks. This is not a solution.
This is theft and punishment of people who have worked their asses off and made somethng out of nothing. Versus 25 years post-apartheid where the black “leadership” has done nothing for the millions wallowing in poverty and birthing eight children per woman.
It’s a distraction so the blacks don’t kill their own black leadership. The “leaders” have churned this up, and that’s easy to do with the uneducated masses living in shantytowns, to take the focus off the real problem. The strategy, “Hey, let’s keep blaming the white man. Yah, yah. That will work.”
Meanwhile Cyril Ramaphosa gets wealth, to the tune of $450 million. And Malema says, yah, we may end up having to kill the white man.
Of course this is the perfect environment for the Western world to allow this to happen, given the popular stance now is white self-loathing and “hate whitey.”
Apart from interest payments..
>> If there is human and capital flight after this theft, South Africa will indeed be headed for IMF support.
Why does SA need IMF loans when they can print money? What’s the difference between borrowing to buy X and printing to buy X?
The difference is that no one has to accept your printed paper in exchange for goods and services. The Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe and Venezuela all tried that and it didn’t work. Central banks printing presses are not magical instruments.
Yeah, unless you are USA it is tough to print money in globalist system. To make it realistic you must back it with something like gold. But then you may get a sword shoved up your ass by a banker lackey such as HRC
You’re aware I’m sure that the practice of bank lending creates money, and in addition it seems that a loan originating in USD then converted to ZAR creates in general both USD and ZAR. Check out the last 2 minutes of this session, from 27 mins to the end:
So, again, what’s the difference between South Africa borrowing (effectively from its local banks) and printing, apart from the obvious advantages to printing: no FX risk and no interest payments?
“A South African bank has sparked a firestorm of criticism after informing customers they would still have to pay off their mortgage even if their property is seized by the government”.
I suspect many of the farmers have made damn sure their property is mortgaged to the hilt before giving up their land if they could. Just imagine the repossession process. Will it be the UN Blue Helmets this time?
“Any plan to confiscate land in the name of “justice” is not just…”
There’s nothing special, diiiferent, or magical about land.
You’re still correct.
Just as you would be equally; no more, no less; right if you replaced “land” with “cars,” “income,” “guns” or anything else.
It’s the confiscation in and of itself that is problematic. Not whether what is being confiscated currently is politically correct or not.