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COMMUNAL LAND TENURE: ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER INTERIM PROTECTION ACT EXTENSION
- 27 September 2024
- Agriculture, Land Reform & Rural Development
- SA Legal Academy
The provisions of the 1996 Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act will apply for another year, ending on 31 December 2025. This was confirmed by a recently gazetted notice possibly meriting a statement from Land Reform & Rural Development Minister Mzwanele Nyhontso – the Government of National Unity Cabinet’s only Pan Africanist Congress of Azania member.
Among other things, a report on the work of the previous Parliament’s Agriculture, Land Reform & Rural Development Committee recommended a review of and possible amendments to legislation and policy frameworks relevant to ‘address(ing) tenure security for people with informal land rights’. The report earmarks the introduction of a Communal Land Tenure Bill and ‘related policy instruments to record people’s rights’ as ‘key’ processes for the seventh administration.
However, according to a presentation document considered during a meeting of the National Assembly’s Land Reform & Rural Development Committee on 21 August 2024, a Communal Land Bill seeking to address the issues concerned is only expected to be tabled in Parliament in 2026. Slide 11 of the document notes that the legislation envisaged will:
- ‘regulate communal land … occupied and controlled by communities in the former homelands’
- transfer communal land held in trust by organs of state to the communities occupying it, and
- enable these communities to ‘administer’ this land themselves.
It is now more than seven years since the Bill was released in draft form for comment.
Readers are referred to the SA Legal Academy report below for a link to the 1996 Act and more related information.
- Government Gazette notice
- committee report (page 116 of parliamentary documents tabled on 26 March 2024)
- August 2024 presentation document
- SA Legal Academy report
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch
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