IN THE SPOTLIGHT: COMMUNAL LAND TENURE BILL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS DRAGS ON

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: COMMUNAL LAND TENURE BILL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS DRAGS ON

• 30 September 2026
• In the Spotlight
• SA Legal Academy

The ongoing delay in tabling a Communal Land Tenure Bill in Parliament has been attributed to slow progress with the development of a security of land rights policy. This is according to Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) records of an 18 February 2026 meeting of the National Assembly’s Land Reform & Rural Development Committee. Briefing members on the status of the proposed new piece of legislation, Department of Land Reform & Rural Development acting director-general Clinton Heimann drew extensively from a report prepared by the inter-ministerial committee on land reform and agriculture. Outlining the work of the committee between July 2018 and May 2024, the document’s publication date is not clear.

As SA Legal Academy reported in October 2025, the Bill was expected to have been tabled by the end of August 2026. However, PMG records quote Heimann as having told the committee that, in February 2026:

• a policy document underpinning the Communal Land Tenure Bill was only expected to be finalised ‘around June 2026’ for submission to Cabinet for approval and a ‘constitutionality check’, while
• the Bill itself had nevertheless been sent to the Office of the Chief State Law Advisor for a pre-certification opinion.

No official information is available on any significant developments since then.

Released in draft form in July 2017 for comment, the Bill may well have been extensively revised during the intervening years and may therefore need to be subjected to a further round of public consultations. A PMG report on the committee’s 29 April 2026 meeting refers to ‘over 10 legal opinions’ sought to ‘ensure’ its constitutionality.

Meanwhile, the inter-ministerial committee report circulated at the National Assembly committee’s 18 February 2026 meeting notes – among other things – that the Bill:

• is underpinned by sub-section 25(6) of the Constitution on security of tenure or comparable redress in the context of ‘past racially discriminatory laws or practices’
• ‘is not the first attempt by the democratic state to pass (the required) legislation’ (referring to the 2004 Communal Land Rights Act, which a May 2010 Constitutional Court ruling declared ‘invalid in its entirety’)
• gives effect to government’s commitment ‘to divest its ownership of communal land and transfer land it holds in trust to traditional communities already occupying the land or to land rights holders or to de-factor owners’, and that
• the Bill’s objectives include:
  • ensuring the transfer of ownership of communal land by the state organs of the state ‘to persons and communities occupying such land’
  • ensuring that communal land is registered in the name of a person or community occupying it, and
  • ‘creating dispute resolution mechanisms on matters relating to communal land rights’.

It is against that backdrop that, on 25 September 2026, the Department of Rural Development & Land Reform gazetted a notice extending the 1996 Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act’s application to 31 December 2027.

• inter-ministerial committee report
• May 2010 Constitutional Court ruling
• 25 September 2026 Government Gazette notice
• SA Legal Academy October 2025 report

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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