More than 20 years into the post apartheid south Africa, the land question remains unresolved.  The majority of South African citizens still do not have their tenure adequately secured, and land redistribution targets are not being met.

New ideas are urgently needed to deal with these challenges.  A loose network of civil society organisations and academics, including Afesis-corplan, are gearing up to make submissions to governments High Level Panel on Key Legislation, on how to tweak existing legislation and develop new legislation to deal with these challenges.  One proposal is to develop an alternative land recoding system to deal with land tenure in ‘off-register’ contexts like communal land areas and informal settlements. Further ideas are being explored to operationalise section 25.5 of the constitution which calls on the state to “take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis”.   Far more can and needs to be done to redistribute urban and rural land in South African from the haves’ to the have not’s.