Jubilee Land Bank

Since the 2019 elections, the rise of the radical Left has been somewhat contained, by a combination of factors.  EFF leaders are compromised, particularly by the VBS scandal.  The Freedom Front Plus advanced at the expense of the DA in the election results.  And there was a turnover - the ANC intercepted the EFF’s initiative on “expropriation without compensation” and took possession of this impetus.

The danger is that any real change in the status quo could be very protracted.  First, while the new constitutional amendment passes through Parliament.  Then possibly it could be challenged in the courts?  All this is causing progress to bog down, while Rome burns.  The conditions and dim prospects that face our youth today are totally unacceptable.  Meanwhile the great debate remains largely a talk shop.

So C4L has decided to put forward a practical proposal.  It could work, but only if the churches (read: all denominations) get behind it.  Historically, it takes a lot of time to get all church denominations pulling together in the same direction.  But it can happen if there is strong leadership.  And if there is not too much resistance from the state (or other political parties).

There is no reason why the state or its opposition parties should discourage the churches from starting the proposed JUBILEE LAND BANK.  It can only be seen as intervening on behalf of the landless poor, at a time when other initiatives have stalled.  They might not like it if this were an “either/or” scenario, but a JUBILEE LAND BANK can dovetail very well with either the status quo or with a future regime which allows expropriation without compensation.

Jubilee may only be a once-in-a-lifetime occurance, but it is also recurrent or cyclical, not static.  So it can be seen as value-added to the overall mix of Land Reform.  C4L's prospectus offers God-fearing farmers an unprecedented opportunity to share their abundance with the poor.  Not as a hand-out, but as a hand up.  Compared to the fifty percent Giving Pledge proposed for millionnaires - by billionnaires - a land-tithe is not so much. 

This is an ambitious proposal.  C4L is punching above its weight, it is a voice crying in the veld.

 

Also available is a book called ORANIA AND AZANIA.  You can purchase through Mbokodo Publishers, either at its eShop or order a print-media copy:

Ebook link: https://mbokodopublishers.eshop.co.za/eBook-ePub-&-mobi-Orania-and-Azania-by-CO-Stephens-p192416852

Paperback pre-order link: https://mbokodopublishers.eshop.co.za/PAPERBACK-PRE-ORDER-Orania-and-Azania-by-CO-Stephens-p192421322

 

 

Sampie Terreblanche - LOST IN TRANSFORMATION

(Remember that he was an Afrikaner)

“In spite of the close relationship between wealth and poverty in all neoliberal capitalist countries, the rich are usually not prepared to acknowledge that they are rich because the majority is poor.  The rich usually live in denial about the causal relationships between wealth and poverty.  They don’t like to be the flipside of the poor.  The rich are always very self-assured, very complacent and very arrogant about their wealth.  They are always of the opinion that what belongs to them does so because of their merit, inventiveness and perseverance, and that nobody – but nobody – has the right to take it from them.  In the South African case, the role that political and economic  power constellations have played in the (artificial) enrichment of whites in the century before 1994, and in the (artificial) enrichment of the elite since 1994, is so obvious that it is not necessary to argue the point.  We are confronted in South Africa with a serious poverty problem.  We are at the same time also confronted with a serious opulence problem.   (pages 111, 112)

 

“The inequality gap between the very rich and the very poor in South Africa are so monstrously big that it is necessary to reflect on the luxurious and extravagant lifestyle that many of the very rich permit themselves in comparison with the lifestyle the very poor are doomed to live.  When the conspicuous consumption, the wastefulness, the greediness and the arrogance of the very rich are judged against the misery and deprivation of so many poor people, then we have no alternative but to be shocked at the vulgarity and the repulsiveness of the lifestyle of the rich.  Are the rich and the poor really citizens of the same South Africa?

“Is it not time to bring about a Codesa on why so many people are so excessively too rich and why even more people are so hopelessly poor?  The churches played a strategic role in the struggle against apartheid.  Why are the churches not conducting an open war on behalf of those that are undeservedly poor and against those that are undeservedly rich?”  (pages 119, 120)