Why Land Seizure Is Back in News in South Africa: QuickTake Q&A

More than two decades after white-minority rule ended in South Africa, most of its profitable farms and estates are still owned by white people, and about 95 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of 10 percent of the population. President Jacob Zuma, in his final year as head of the ruling African National Congress, is vowing to step up wealth distribution and promising “radical economic transformation,” including constitutional changes to allow the government to expropriate land without paying for it.

Under the rule of European colonists, South Africa’s Natives Land Act of 1913 stripped most black people of their right to own property, a policy reinforced decades later by the National Party and its system of apartheid, or apartness. By 2010, records of who owned what in the country were “uncoordinated, inadequate or incomplete,” according to Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti, prompting the government to embark on a land audit that it released in 2013. Though the audit offered some insight into land ownership -- it showed that 14 percent of land belonged to the state, versus 79 percent by private individuals, companies and trusts -- it didn’t break this down by race.