Just completed Mbeki's position paper on Land and the National Question. This thread is a summary of his argument: 1. The ANC has throughout its history challenged colonialism through the alternative vision of a non-racial humanist society.
2. This alternative vision was encapsulated in the principles of the Freedom Charter which suggests that land must be shared by all who work on it; and expropriation must be accompanied by compensation.
3. This was agreed to because the Freedom Charter envisages the ANC as serving all South Africans, black and white, even as it committed to addressing the historical injustice of colonialism and land dispossession of blacks in general and Africans in particular.
4. The ANC at its 54th National Conference in December 2017 abandoned its long held perspective, contained in the Freedom Charter, of expropriation with compensation, without fully realizing that this in effect compromised its long held vision of a non-racial society.
5.The ANC resolution on expropriation without compensation at its 54th National conference simply capitulated to the EFF position in this regard.
6. This EFF position violates the ANC's long held commitment to non-racialism which it steadfastedly stood for in the breakaway of the PAC in 1958 and in the expulsion of the Gang of Eight in the early 1970s.
7. Malema the leader of the EFF inappropriately quotes ANC policy when he suggests that the ANC's notion of the people has historically been 'Blacks in general and Africans in particular', without recognizing that this must be understood in the context of a non-racial society.
8. The Policy resolution on land at the 54th National Conference, which underscored expropriation without compensation, represented a continuity of the PAC's and EFF's notion of the national question, rather than the historical progressive nationalism of the ANC.
9. It is incumbent on the leadership of the ANC to explain how its new resolution on land is compatible with its progressive approach to the national question and its commitment to building a non-racial society.
