Confiscation without compensation: Good idea/bad idea

Something has arisen in my world regarding an issue that has jumped out of the political woodwork with all the same shock that President Trump has generated with his idea that Trade Wars are fun. Guess he forgot about Smoot/Hawley. We forgot why we put that clause in. So our version of the “let us mess with the system” theory of government threatens to hold back all eco/social development activity in the country in which I live, for yet another year; [we lost last year dealing with a recalcitrant President.] The key demand is to nationalise the land.


Our neighboring President did it about 16 years ago [long time to remember that] and successfully took his country back to the 17th century where he believed it all went wrong: and that it was time to start over. So far it is dissappointing to those it was supposed to benefit and so a few million have moved here to make a few bucks.Eventually his own Generals tossed him last year so they could get some traction on developing the place. How do you come back from the 17th century in less than a another one or two.


Next year is election time and everybody wants to grab the election spotlight on their terms.


The issue: Confiscation of property without compensation. A proposal to toss the embedded Konstitutional clause, that forbids konfiskation of property [land] without kompensation, was heavily approved by most parties with populist enthusiasm, in Parly’ last week.A decision, many would say, that could rank with Brexiteering, and the mellifluous Mr Trump, as wrongfooted, unless amazingly cleverly handled… something we are not above successfully achieving once or twice in a century.


Now. I write fiction and currently I am half way through phase five, in a twenty-five year, five phase project. In the process I have become curiously aware, of how the restrictions posed by the Konstitutional provision, can cause potential harm?


For instance: I have just finished an exhaustive final proofreading, of the newly edited version of a novel I published in paperback in 1996. I completed this, preparatory to a new launch of the book, as a follow up to 7Ways, onto Amazon, during this month: by those excellent people at MYeBook.co.za.


The story is called The Buffalo Hunters. It was written initially to exorcise a terrible experience I underwent during the year of our Revolution, on a day that, if it wasn’t already a date of infamy in RSA, [it was] subsequently became a day of infamy for much of the planet: 9/11.


The story, that I call a ‘”brutally allegoric crime story”, subsequently became Part One of a set that I call ‘The Azanian Quartet’… a series that covers the period 1994 to 2136. [Part three ‘The Jonker Memorandum” exists as an 84 episode podcast cyber serial on the website:nicholasjakari.com]. Part 4 is presently three quarters done and four more quarters to go: allowing for errors and omissions and rewrites.


1994 was a year [you may remember]in which our national murder rate went to 66/100,000 people [it is currently still unacceptably high, albeit now down in the 30’s]. The Buffalo Hunters, a vehicle hijacking gang on the run, is a story about one such weekend filled with murder… many murders, with multiple players set in post revolution JoziUniCity.


A particular scene in the violent graphic story, was set in the streets of a high rise region of the inner city, where the ‘night lights’ were more specifically camp fires in the sky, as residents of multiple, electricity free, hijacked, high rise tower block buildings, lit fires in their upstairs spaces to cook and keep warm: a scene written empirically during the winter of ’95.


And today, almost a quarter of a century later, as I’m re-reading what I wrote, the problem of inner city degeneration has morphed into a massive conundrum: with hijacked buildings listing in huge multiples possibly even thousands… across the city.


Apparently, close to none of them can be simply expropriated by the city, and converted to low cost housing, because non-existent, or absentee or even the absentee estates of absentee, now deceased owners, are relatively untouchable, due in part to the existence of the konstitutional clause prohibeting the uncompensated confiscation of landed property.


It seems the City has to rescue the buildings first, then struggle to contact owners, negotiate forever; and at prices that shift reality, and the moment their eye is off the ball: which is obviously often… the places are ‘re-hijacked’ … and the city is the loser.


According to the Mayor: Mr. Herman Mashaba, on radio 702 this morning, [5 March] the city has managed to restore 18 [Eighteen] buildings to their rightful owners… out of the many, many hundreds hijacked over decades now, given that it was already an established practice when I wrote the story [and that scene] in the first place during that winter of ’95.


So it does seem that we have had ‘expropriation without compensation’ now for more than a quarter of a century. I would imagine that many citizens have become immensely wealthy on the cash they were able to garner, by not paying rates [municipal taxes], electricity, personal tax, company taxes and/or royalty fees to anyone much over the 22 years, since I published the original story.


On the debit side, presumably their bribery and konektions accounts are pretty heavily loaded: such are the sources of wonderful meat for crime stories; and such ‘entrepreneurial’ people and their minions n marks form the base for many of the characters in my bloodthirsty story, of a period in history, when as one character puts it: “ There has never been a better time than now: to commit murder.”


Launch date to be confirmed during March, although you can place orders off my site at https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari with more details as they alter.


Enjoy.
PS. Should there be any problem with that last idea let me know so i can take action.