Theunis Roux
It is hard to comment on a draft constitutional amendment that is apparently not in its final form. But the stakes surrounding the proposed change to section 25 of South Africa’s constitution are too high to wait until the governing African National Congress (ANC) sets out exactly how it wants to alter it.
As the draft Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill, 2019 is currently worded, section 25(2)(b) would be changed to provide that:
a court may, where land and any improvements thereon are expropriated for the purposes of land reform, determine that the amount of compensation is nil.
In addition, a new section 25(3A) would be inserted authorising parliament to set out the circumstances in which such an order could be made, subject to the constitution.
Existing commentary on this proposal has tended to split into two camps.
On one view, expressed by the Constitutional Review Committee responsible
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