The IFP may have voted for the expropriation of land, but party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi yesterday told his supporters he was opposed to the aspect of the policy that calls for expropriating white-owned farms without compensation.
Buthelezi warned South Africans not to support the policy as it would chase away investors and lead to more wide scale poverty.
He said President Cyril Ramaphosa was making a serious economic mistake by insisting on not compensating white landowners.
The EFF and ANC did not respond to questions yesterday.
“Ramaphosa keeps saying that expropriation of land without compensation will happen, but in a way that will not harm the economy.
“But I am waiting to see how he will do that, because if I were businessman from England, Europe or America I would not invest my money in a country that does not compensate landowners. Only an insane businessperson would invest here,” said Buthelezi.
He was addressing hundreds of his supporters in uMlazi, south of Durban, for the celebration of Human Rights Day.
The event was also meant to celebrate the party’s forty-third birthday.
He said if Ramaphosa implemented the land expropriation policy without removing the “no compensation” clause, the country would go the route of Zimbabwe, which was plunged into poverty after the land was grabbed from white farmers without compensation.
Buthelezi said that during the Convention for a Democratic South Africa prior to the first democratic elections in 1994, the IFP was involved in the drafting of the constitution, where land redistribution with compensation was adopted.
He reminded South Africans that white farmers were the producers of food, since black people were not comprehensively involved in agriculture.
He said it had been proven in Russia that a country’s economy could not survive under a nationalisation policy.
He said he had even been warned against nationalisation by former Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere.
“When I was the KwaZulu government prime minister, I was visited by youths from Russia who told me they wanted nothing to do with communism because it had destroyed their country,” he said.
Buthelezi also lashed out at EFF leader Julius Malema for calling for the expropriation of KwaZulu-Natal land governed by the Ingonyama Trust Board on behalf of King Goodwill Zwelithini.
It was reported that Malema recently said that the issue of expropriation of land should be debated without fear of the king.
Malema has twice visited the king and presented him with herds of cattle.
“If I were the king I would tell Malema to take his cattle back, because what he said did not make some of us happy,” he said.