South African think tank the Free Market Foundation (FMF) has, while praising the elimination of gender discrimination in the Upgrading or Land Tenure Rights Act (ULTRA) Amendment Bill, sharply criticised other aspects of the proposed legislation. In particular, the FMF cited the excessive discretionary powers the Bill will give to the responsible Minister and that it amounted to land dispossession.

ULTRA, in its current form, gave black South Africans living on formal land the right to the title deeds for that land, explained the think tank. These title deeds would be fully tradable. It should have transformed the lives of, and empowered, many of the poorest of South Africans. Yet the law has largely gone unenforced. “ULTRA has been ignored except by the FMF’s Khaya Lam Land Reform Project which has been helping homeowners, mostly elderly black women, exercise their right to title deeds,” affirmed FMF CEO Leon Louw.

However, the first clause of the amendment bill will remove the automatic conversion of land tenure rights into ownership of that land. Instead, people will have to apply for that tenure to be turned into ownership. The Minister would have the power to decline such applications, as well as approve them. The FMF described this discretionary power as “extreme” and completely out of place in a democracy.

“[The Bill] proposes what might be the biggest land dispossession in history,” he charged. “Victims will be almost exclusively millions of poor black South Africans. They will be placed right back where [apartheid ideologue and Prime Minister Hendrik] Verwoerd had them – wards of government under the whimsical direction of officialdom.”

“Millions of people could lose their homes,” continued Louw. “The Bill proposes a gigantic act of expropriation without compensation from the poorest and the most vulnerable – people deprived of resources with which to defend themselves. … The Bill could force occupiers of future land to apply for ownership but should never be considered for previously liberated land. Retroactive deprivation would be a manifestly unjust, racist, unconscionable travesty. It should be scrapped.”

Currently, ULTRA gives people full, clear, land ownership. “Had ULTRA been implemented as intended, there would be thriving land markets in predominantly ‘black’ areas with more black land-owning households than the entire white population,” he asserted. “A trillion rand of dead capital would have been liberated into the hands of newly empowered and enriched families, and, through them, into the economy. Millions of destitute people would have been enriched and bankable.”