Legal Articles and Guides

The Council of the Cape Law Society has urged government and the ANC to eliminate the policy uncertainty around expropriation without compensation, writes Legalbrief. Lulama Lobi, president of the Cape Law Society, said the expropriation debate was of serious concern, especially with regard to the rule of law, the supremacy of the Constitution and respect for human rights.

Commission-discounting real estate agencies, mainly owned by lawyers, are savaging the traditional agencies in the Eastern Cape over the latter’s high commission rates, ranging from 7% and sometimes up to 10%, depending on the complexity of the deal. As the fight gets nasty, the likely outcome will be commission cuts by all agencies, says attorney Laila Conlon, whose legal firm incorporates Conlon Prop, a 3.5% agency, notes a Daily Dispatch report.

A R1.5bn plan by the City of Cape Town to develop Maiden's Cove, a scenic headland and beach in Camps Bay, is facing a court challenge from city residents. The development of the cove area, devised in 2015, includes plans for 52 residential homes, a boutique hotel, retail and restaurant spaces, and a parking garage for 700 vehicles.

A Stellenbosch property trust's application against the illegal occupation of a family-owned property, renamed 'Azania' by the occupiers, was postponed to 6 September in the Western Cape High Court yesterday. The application for an interdict by the owners of Watergang was last postponed on 21 August because Advocate Ayanda Gladile had been appointed after residents of the shacks collected money for a legal fightback, and he needed time to prepare.

Black First Land First leader Andile Mngxitama assisted unauthorised people to occupy a mansion in Brooklyn in Johannesburg, notes a report on the IoL site. The house had been standing empty for about three years after the owner died. Lawyer Michael Potgieter, the executor of the estate of the late Willem and Dorothea Serfontein, turned to the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) to have the squatters evicted.

US President Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet yesterday on SA’s land expropriation without compensation proposals was placed in perspective by the US State Department last night, notes Daily News. It said it believed expropriation without compensation ‘would risk sending SA down the wrong path’. This was after Trump tweeted earlier: ‘I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers. 'South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers'.’

The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) says it is disappointed by a SCA judgment rejecting arguments to appoint a special master to oversee land claims made by labour tenants. A News24 report says the case went on appeal to the SCA after the Land Claims Court ruled in December 2016 that a special master be appointed to expedite claims for portions of lands that labour tenants have worked and lived on.

Gauteng Judge President Dunstan Mlambo has ordered a full Bench to sort out the tangle of inconsistent home repossession judgments, reports GroundUp. The landmark case to decide how banks should deal with home repossessions will now be heard on 28 and 29 August in the Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg). Mlambo also wants the court to establish under what circumstances judges should set reserve prices on repossessed homes.

Residents facing eviction from their homes in Woodstock were entitled to challenge the City of Cape Town's housing plan, the Western Cape High Court has ruled. The residents believe the city has gone against its own policy by excluding them and others from two sites near the CBD earmarked for transitional housing sites, says GroundUp.

The Constitutional Court has reserved judgment in a case involving the future of 12 poor Cape Town residents facing eviction from homes they have been living in for nearly two decades, says a Cape Times report. The residents had bought the houses through the Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC) – a social housing development company wholly owned by the National Housing Finance Corporation, and formed to administer the delivery of houses in the city.

As the ANC prepares legislative changes to speed up land reform, the government has identified the first 139 farms to be expropriated. Party insiders who attended the two-day lekgotla of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) last week, the ANC’s highest decision-making body gave details of the legislative plans and the expropriation ‘guinea pig’ scheme, says a Sunday Times report.

The ANC’s planned constitutional amendment will not make ‘one iota of difference’ to fixing the land shambles, according to one of SA’s leading experts on land reform. ‘I am not interested in whether the Constitution changes,’ said Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. This was because section 25 of the Constitution already gave the government a mandate for transformation, but it had set out to achieve the opposite.

South Africans of Khoisan heritage want a ceremonial handover of all land in the country to their community before the government moves forward with land expropriation without compensation, says a Times Select report. ‘Why is everyone else talking about the land and everyone is silent about the first nation people? When everybody came here, they found our forefathers here,’ said Anthony Williams from the Indigenous First Nation Advocacy SA.

‘Land reform has failed rural people, and it has never been an urban programme. It has failed people because it has not redistributed or restituted land on the scale promised nor has it given rural and urban people with little access to productive resources and insecure tenure what they need from land reform,’ say land researchers Donna Hornby and Lauren Royston.

Illegal invaders occupying school land in Heideveld are for now protected from eviction after the Western Cape High Court granted them a stay but also prevented additional people from squatting on the land. A Cape Argus report says more than 100 Heideveld backyarders on the housing list invaded vacant land behind Cathkin High School and erected shacks on the land.