White-owned property in South Africa’s cities and towns will be
seized along with white farms in order to provide “high-density housing”
for blacks, and whites are to blame for the country’s collapsing train
services, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced.
Addressing a meeting of “traditional leaders” in the Cape Town City Hall on Wednesday this week,
as part of the ANC’s election campaign, Ramaphosa also blamed Apartheid
[read whites] for African backwardness and the fact that blacks are
always poor.
“Land in cities and towns must be
identified for seizure without compensation upon which high-density housing can
be developed so that ordinary South Africans can live close to their places of
work,” Ramaphosa told the meeting.
“Apartheid distributed people outside of
the major cities. The poor lived outside the cities, and the rich inside them,”
he continued.
“Just like other world cities, South Africa
had to develop high-density housing in the city and town centers, and the
government was going to use the seizure of land without compensation program to
identity suitable land within the urban areas.
“This is going to reduce the living costs
of the poor who will then not have to travel so far to their places of work,”
he said.
This is the first open confirmation that it
is not just farms which are going to be seized under the “no compensation”
rules scheduled to be introduced in March 2019, but also white properties in
urban areas.
Ramaphosa went on to blame whites for the
collapsing railway infrastructure in South Africa, even though the ANC has
ruled the country for the last 25 years.
He acknowledged that the public transport infrastructure was very
poor and that it cost the South African economy dearly. He undertook to
“pull the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) right”
after a new series of criminal corruption scandals recently shook the state-owned rail transportation system.
“Some train stations in the townships [the
black suburbs] are closed. People do not use them anymore because of crime and
the unreliability of the train system,” Ramaphosa told the meeting, adding that
this too was due to the “heritage of apartheid [read whites] which left us with
poor public transport systems.”
