Cape Town - Academic and rural residents on Wednesday snubbed a discussion with the standing committee on agriculture on the upgrading of the Land Tenure Rights Amendment (Ultra) Bill.
In the end, only three provincial government departments acknowledged the standing committee’s call for public input on the amendment bill.
The three were the Department of Economic Development and Tourism (Dedat), the Department of Human Settlements and the Department of Agriculture, according to the committee procedural officer Shareen Niekerk.
Niekerk said: “The committee did not receive many comments on the amendment bill and did not receive any from members of the public.”
She said the response from Dedat was a no comment, and that human settlements said they had nothing further to add to comments they made in June 2020. At that time, they said they were unclear as to the extent of the provincial government’s responsibility for implementing the amendments to the bill.
"The department of agriculture said the provincial government could not support the amendment bill because, among other things, the national department of agriculture, land reform and rural development did not publish the bill for public comment before introducing it to Parliament and had not consulted widely,“ said Niekerk.
The amendment bill was necessitated by two orders of the Constitutional Court including one which found that the Act, which dates back to 1991, was unconstitutional because it discriminated against the rights of women to independently own property.
Committee chairperson Andricus van der Westhuizen (DA) said: “We note with concern the haste by Parliament to comply with the date set by the Court, which, in turn, has placed the NCOP and provinces under severe pressure to deal with this amendment Bill."
As the only member of the committee to call for the province’s representative at the NCOP to support the amendment Bill, ANC provincial agriculture spokesperson Pat Marran said: “The issues raised against the amendment bill seem to have only come up now and were not raised previously. We already dealt with the unconstitutional sections of the Bill in the select committee.”
Committee member Peter Marais (FF+) warned that the legislature should be wary of letting the courts have too much say in legislation and said: “I am concerned about how many times people run to the High Court to try and usurp the powers of the legislature.”
The legislature's legal adviser Romeo Maasdorp said: “In substance the amendment Bill addresses the concerns the Constitutional Court raised, but tripped itself up with its compromised procedural timelines. So I cannot advise support.”
Cape Argus