This article was first published by Daily Friend on 25 September 2025
When the business group Sakeliga revealed the details surrounding the ongoing Driefontein expropriation without compensation in Ekurhuleni on 20 September 2025, the only real question that came to mind was: Where is Dean Macpherson?
In January, right after it was revealed that Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act, Macpherson, the Democratic Alliance (DA)’s Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, tweeted that “there will be NO expropriation of private property without compensation on my watch”.
Constructive criticism of the DA on policy is rarely adequately addressed, with the party seemingly far more eager to engage endlessly with journalists on questions of “racism”.
So when the DA executive caucus’s inaction on expropriation without compensation (more legally correctly, confiscation) is under scrutiny, the best argument the party’s sycophants have thus far been able to muster is, “Parliament adopted the Expropriation Act before the Government of National Unity (GNU) was formed!” Or, in this case, “the expropriation process began in 2019, before Macpherson became Minister!”
This obsession with timelines and calendar dates is not evident among South Africa’s other parties.
Assurances about the state of property protection
What is most irksome, however, is not that Macpherson “did not stop” the dispossession at Driefontein, though I will note below some things that the Minister can in fact do despite the ostensibly insurmountable obstacle of elapsed time.
Rather, it is that both Macpherson and his boss, DA Leader and Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, have misrepresented the state of property protection in South Africa to investors, developers, and farmers.
Indeed, the Driefontein confiscation began in February 2019, with the City of Ekurhuleni finally stating in April 2020 that it “offers Nil compensation being the sum in the amount of R0.00 (Zero Rand.” The property it is confiscating, at the time, was worth at least R30 million, but likely much more.
And yet, on 3 February 2025, five years later, Macpherson addressed members of the investment community at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town. He reassured them, saying that he wanted “to be unequivocal: No one in South Africa is having their land confiscated.”
Think about that statement in 2025 for a moment.
Macpherson continued, saying that as Minister, “Land grabs will never be allowed. This is my commitment to the people of South Africa and our partners around the world.”
Three months later, on 16 May, Steenhuisen, in defending the GNU and condemning the United States’ offer of refugee status to South Africa’s racial minorities, told the agriculturalist gathering at NAMPO in Bothaville that, “There’s no single farm that’s being expropriated without compensation.”
Again, think about that for just a moment.
At the same gathering, Macpherson, now likely thoroughly browbeaten by his African National Congress (ANC) colleagues and the so-called “lawyers” and academics who have spent the years since 2018 defending the constitutionally indefensible position that “nil” qualifies as an “amount” of “compensation” able to be “paid” in terms of sections 25(2) and (3) of the Constitution, repeated that falsehood. He said that “nil compensation” is a form of compensation. “Nil compensation is clearly defined and” is not the same as “expropriation without compensation.”
On 21 September, after the Sakeliga revelation, DA National Spokesperson Willie Aucamp said that the party “condemns in the strongest possible terms the decision by the ANC-controlled City of Ekurhuleni to expropriate private land without paying a cent in compensation.”
Apparently, now, the DA acknowledges that yes, indeed, property confiscation is happening. It did not all simply come to Donald Trump in a fever-dream or from the “misinformation” the DA’s old allies have been spreading abroad.
It is not merely that the Minister of Public Works – the responsible minister for expropriation in terms of both the 1975 and 2025 Expropriation Acts – has not interceded, but that people closely associated with the DA have been both dishonest, by telling investors, developers, and farmers repeatedly that there is no property confiscation happening, and at the same time given false assurances about the future.
Evidently, there are property confiscations occurring in South Africa which the Minister of Public Works did or ought to have known about in February. And evidently private property is in dire danger as not merely the Free Market Foundation, Institute of Race Relations, or AfriForum warned that it is, but as the DA itself at various junctures admitted it is.
It was only after the DA entered the GNU that the tune suddenly shifted, with its ministers seeking to reassure the investment and development community that their property is safe.
And it is not that any amorphous “Doomsday Coalition” is threatening private property: it is the very Government of National Unity now in office that is doing so.
Investors, more specifically foreign investors, implicitly trust the DA. It has a long history of opposing the ANC’s reckless policies and finding itself on the side of reform. Knocking on the doors of DA leaders in the GNU is to be expected. That they would walk away from such engagements with misapprehensions about the protective status their property enjoys in South Africa is truly disheartening.
Having to tell, as I have, foreign diplomats and journalists that they are unfortunately being misled by the very people who campaigned vociferously against confiscatory policy is not a position I imagined myself being in, nor is it one I relish.
What should the Minister do?
When Macpherson was sworn in as a minister, he uttered these legally binding words:
“I, Dean William Macpherson, swear that I will be faithful to the Republic of South Africa and will obey, respect and uphold the Constitution and all other law of the Republic; and I undertake to hold my office as Minister with honour and dignity; to be a true and faithful counsellor; not to divulge directly or indirectly any secret matter entrusted to me; and to perform the functions of my office conscientiously and to the best of my ability.”
Section 7(2) of the Constitution he swore to uphold provides that, “The state must respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights,” and section 8(1) goes on to provide that, “The Bill of Rights applies to all law, and binds the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and all organs of state.”
Section 25(2) of the Constitution provides that property may only be expropriated “subject to compensation,” and subsection (3) goes on to affirm that there must be a “payment” of an “amount” of compensation (not “consolation”).
That he must act is therefore beyond any question (we wait with bated breath). What, then, within the realm of reason, should he do?
If he has not already – and neither he nor his department has given us any reason to believe that he has or plans to – the Minister should immediately intervene in the court proceedings concerning the Driefontein property confiscation and make at least these submissions:
- The 1975 Expropriation Act, under which the confiscation is supposedly happening, did not allow for compensationless takings of property;
- The Constitution requires the payment of an amount of compensation upon expropriation; and
- The Department of Public Works, as the department primarily responsible for expropriation in South Africa and the representative of the central government in such matters, unequivocally opposes the municipality’s conduct in the national interest. Departmental experts in valuation, etc., must be mustered to support the cause of the expropriated owner during the upcoming trial.
Macpherson’s colleague, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)’s Velenkosini Hlabisa, who is the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, and therefore the functionary in the central government responsible for local government, must also join in these proceedings.
That is the legal side of things. Now the political:
The Minister must ensure that the Department of Public Works pays the full amount of the challenge against the confiscation, regardless of the effect this might have on the departmental audit. This will be the correct utilisation of state money: the protection of private property.
The Department must then inform the City of Ekurhuleni that all services rendered by the Department to that municipality are suspended while it persists in conducting itself unconstitutionally.
If the spirit of Machiavelli is completely absent in a political actor, that actor represents little of value to its constituents. South Africans, in particular DA and IFP voters, did not bestow a mandate upon their representatives to tick boxes and play formality games. They voted for a substantive outcome: “save South Africa” from the destruction wrought by ANC policy!
Or, you know, if effort is not really on the agenda, the ministers can declare an intergovernmental dispute with Ekurhuleni. Something. Anything.
This would be a true reassurance for investors and property owners.
It would signal that the DA and other former Multi-Party Charter parties are in fact using (not merely pretending to use) their position in the GNU to control the excesses of ANC misconduct, as they promised they would. And it would further signal that the usually unbearable financial burden for ordinary owners associated with legal challenges would be borne by the state on Macpherson’s and Hlabisa’s watch.
None of this will happen, of course. Macpherson’s quick tweeting in January was not matched this time around. At the time of writing, neither he nor his department have said anything about the Driefontein matter. It was not even “noted with concern”. That speaks directly to co-option.
Co-option and Doomsday
Might doing any of this get Macpherson fired as a minister? Naturally.
I am old enough to remember some politicians rushing to resign as a matter of conscience and principle, or availing themselves to being sacked for a good cause. If trying to stop property confiscation is not a good reason to get fired over, I do not know what is.
The usual “but then we can’t control the ANC from inside the GNU!” hogwash will be carted out, as if confiscation – the defining feature of the so-called “Doomsday Coalition” the DA warned us about – is not already happening right before our very eyes.
But anyway, the usual refrain of “What can the Minister do?” or “What can the Western Cape do?” is almost never posed in good faith, because every answer is always dismissed offhand for obvious underlying reasons of political expediency.
I and others have spent the better part of the past several years pointing out how the DA and other opposition parties can do the work – not merely the rhetoric – of “saving South Africa,” only for there to be consistent deference to the ANC.
I know precisely (by name) which senior counsel the DA and its ministers rely on when they seek legal opinions, and these are not lawyers steeped in, or in any way committed to the party’s liberal value proposition, or even constitutionalism. Their jurisprudential frame of reference comes directly from the ANC’s legal intelligentsia who have spent the past seven years convincing the country that “nil compensation” is an ordinary part of expropriation law.
So please forgive the cynicism: this is not “DA-bashing.” It is important for the party to do better and thrive as it does so.
Someone, however, has to keep it accountable from its liberal flank, which is by no means a task happily embraced. I would much rather be in the trenches with South Africa’s ostensibly liberal politicians, than realise we often occupy opposite sides of the battlefield.
