President Cyril Ramaphosa told the House that black people, some of whom were in attendance, know the pain of being forcefully removed from their land or homes, therefore they won't do it.
Image: GCIS
President Cyril Ramaphosa indirectly tells AfriForum, Solidarity and all white people who are concerned about land expropriation to rest in comfort because South Africans will not do what the apartheid government did to black people.
The message was also extended to the Democratic Alliance (DA) who recently opened a case against the Expropriation Act, saying it is "unconstitutional".
Ramaphosa was responding to the State of the Nation Address (SONA) Debate that took place in Cape Town on Thursday and Wednesday. He delivered his SONA last Friday.
In his reply, Ramaphosa told the House that black people, some of whom were in attendance, know the pain of being forcefully removed from their land or homes, therefore they won't do it.
In 1968, the apartheid regime began demolishing District Six to make way for a whites-only suburb, he said, adding that more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed.
"Families were torn apart. An entire community and way of life was destroyed.
"Over the course of two decades, the apartheid regime forcibly removed more than 3.5 million people in District Six, Sophiatown, Marabastad, Cato Manor, Kroonstad, Nelspruit and many other places across the country.
"The people of this country know the pain of forced removals. That is why we will never allow forced removals again," he said.
Ramaphosa said this was because South Africa is guided by a constitution that prohibited arbitrary deprivation of property.
Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. It favoured the whites and oppressed the blacks.
Apartheid demanded that South Africa's many racial groupings develop independently in homelands it set up.
Although it seemed to support freedom of cultural expression and equal growth on paper, the manner it was put into practice prevented this, he said.
"Our experience of forced removals also explains the Constitutional requirement that the state must take reasonable measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis.
"It is my firm and enduring belief that all of us as South Africans, as fellow citizens bound together by our history and our present, want the same thing," he said.
Ramaphosa's remarks come after the US Donald Trump cut financial aid to South Africa over the government’s land expropriation policy.
Trump also issued an order for the prioritisation of white Afrikaners through the United States refugee programme, accusing Pretoria of discriminating against Afrikaners through the newly signed Land Expropriation Act.
Many, including the government, have condemned Trump’s decision, saying he was misled and misinformed by AfriForum.
AfriForum turned down the offer by Trump, saying white Afrikaners were going nowhere and the Afrikaners’ future lies in Africa, specifically in South Africa.
Ramaphosa reiterated his stance that South Africans will not be bullied.
kamogelo.moichela@iol.co.za
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