PARLIAMENT is to begin the public hearings into the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill after the Constitutional Court ordered a redraft of the law.
The highest court in the land declared the law invalid in July and gave the national legislature two years to fix it.
Civil society groups had successfully challenged the validity of the bill in court following a process that was followed by Parliament.
Chairman of the select committee on land and minerals in the National Council of Provinces, Olifile Sefako, couldn't be reached for comment yesterday.
However, the committee had indicated its intention to begin with the public hearings this year.
This would meet one of the requirements of the judgment of the Constitutional Court. The land reform programme is at the heart of the government programme.
In his January 8 statement, President Jacob Zuma said they would this year speed up the implementation of the Expropriation Bill. The bill was passed by Parliament after it was initially shelved for almost a decade.
The Land Restitution Bill was passed by Parliament in 2014 and signed into law by Zuma immediately after that. However, the court challenge by civil society groups halted the process to lodge land claims.
At the time close to 200 000 new land claims had been lodged with the state. South Africa has been dealing with land reform over the last 20 years.
The select committee on land and minerals has just under two years to fix the bill. The government had set the deadline of 2019 for people to lodge new claims.
The government has paid out more than R10 billion in compensation for claims lodged before the first deadline of December 1998.
When this window period closed, more than 77 000 claims were lodged with the state.
The government has called on people to take land instead of cash. It said it was concerned that more and more people preferred to take cash.
The process to be undertaken by the committee would require that it meets the deadline of the Constitutional Court.
And the court was clear in its judgment in July that no new claims must be lodged until the process followed by Parliament in drafting the bill was corrected.
The land reform programme will also be discussed by the ANC at its national policy conference in June in Gauteng.
When the ANC went to the Polokwane elective conference in 2007, it agreed on five key priorities for government – land reform, crime prevention, corruption, education and health.
The ruling party was concerned about the slow pace of land reform, and decided at its Mangaung elective conference in 2012 to scrap the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle and replaced it with the equitable share model.
At the June policy conference, the ANC is expected to review progress made in land reform in the past two decades.