On 12 February 2026, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the State of the Nation Address (Sona) with little to no reflection on the state of land reform.
This is despite the government’s National Development Plan targets for 2030 on land reform, including bringing land transfer targets in line with fiscal and economic realities to ensure that land is successfully transferred.
Although the Expropriation Act was passed in 2025 to enable the government to acquire land for the public purpose, including for land reform, expropriation is only a part of the land reform project necessary for the successful transfer of land to the black majority.
Unlike the president’s 2026 Sona, the ANC’s 1992 Ready to Govern document reflects on the state of land reform at the time and identifies specific land and agricultural legislative and policy interventions on the triple focus of land restitution, redistribution and security of tenure.
In March 2025, the Department of Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency released a diagnostic report that sought to determine the reasons for the failure of land reform projects. By its own admission, the government’s land reform agenda was limping along, and its targets subject to doubt. It is therefore strange that a reflection of the state of the nation, four years before the National Development Plan target of 2030, does not address the concerns raised by the diagnostic report.
Challenged in court
We all know that the Expropriation Act is being challenged in court by various groups and individuals including the Democratic Alliance and AfriForum. While this litigation continues, the Nelson Mandela Foundation Trust has also launched its own court challenge against the government’s failure to ensure equitable access to land in terms of section 25(5) of the Constitution.
The Centre for Applied Legal Studies as a member of the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has sought permission to intervene in that application as friends of the court. The centre’s intervention will be based on three broad areas:
- The gendered and intersectional dimensions of land dispossession.
- Comparative and foreign law on the protection of constitutional rights.
- Remedial principles for addressing structural inequalities and gender equity.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation Trust reported in December 2025 that both the Parliament’s Portfolio Committee and the Department of Land Reform had noted the court challenge and were in the process of finalising the proposed Equitable Access to Land Bill.
These are important developments in the land reform project, especially in light of the diagnostic report’s observation that despite government efforts in the rural economy, challenges such as “inequality, displacement of farm dwellers, and exclusion of small and new producers from the formal markets” undermine those efforts. The court challenge and the ensuing bill potentially address the issue of access, and thereby curb displacement.
Of course, the president cannot deal with every government policy intervention in the Sona. However, land reform, which some have argued should be central to SA’s structural reform, perhaps required some mention even to glimpse its successes or shortfalls.
It goes without saying that thousands of black people were forced into farm labour, for example, as a direct consequence of colonialism and apartheid, particularly following the 1913 Natives Land Act. They (we) were dispossessed of their (our) land and stripped of the ability to farm for subsistence.
By confining black South Africans to a small percentage of the country’s land, the act deliberately destroyed self-sufficiency and left people with little choice but to sell their labour in order to survive. Farm work became not a matter of choice, but a necessity for earning an income and supporting families in a system designed to benefit white landowners.
Contextual reality
This is the contextual reality of land reform in the context of economic and legislative policy choices. One of these legislative choices was the Extension of Security of Tenure Act, which was introduced to provide farm occupiers with protection against arbitrary and unlawful evictions.
Due to the remote and secluded nature of commercial farms, many workers were compelled to relocate and live on the farms where they worked. Over time, entire families settled on these farms and became deeply rooted in the farming, often spanning generations. Yet despite their labour and contribution, farm workers and their families were never granted ownership to the homes they occupied, merely the right to residency.
Their right to remain on the land depended entirely on the goodwill of the landowners, leaving them permanently vulnerable to eviction at the slightest conflict, retrenchment or change in ownership. The Extension of Security of Tenure Act seeks to deal with this power dynamic by regulating the terms on which an eviction occurs following the termination of rights of residence.
One of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act’s successes is observed by labour tenants in the Bushy Park Farms of the Eastern Cape who are represented by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies.
Through negotiations that have been ongoing since September 2020, one family of occupiers has finally been relocated and was granted in January 2026 the title to a property purchased at the cost of the farm owner thereby securing the erstwhile farmers’ tenure to land. As such, as even the diagnostic report indicates, land reform achievements, coupled with a recognition of structural challenges, provide a solid foundation for the continued evolution of (land reform) policies.
But silence and delay may mean contempt. The Nelson Mandela Foundation Trust application reminds the state that Section 25 (5) of the Constitution imposes a positive obligation on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures to foster conditions for citizens to have equitable access to land, and that this corollary right is not only symbolic but also enforceable.
The three submissions the Centre for Applied Legal Studies will make will sustain this argument by submitting that the international law obligation to eradicate the consequences of apartheid is not an obligation of conduct or process, but an obligation of result. As such, as opposed to just an obligation of conduct which merely requires an action to realise a right, the government must satisfy specific substantive standards for Section 25 (5) equitable access to land. This is a much greater obligation than just assessing the government's reasonableness in the measures it has taken over the years.
A closer look is necessary
Although Sona addressed imminent agricultural sector interventions such as focusing on the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, a closer look and monitoring of the recommendations made by the diagnostic report in December 2025 is necessary.
These recommendations include revising land reform policies, strengthening cooperative governance accountability through the Presidential Coordination Council and Inter-Ministerial Committee on Land Reform, as well as a focus on more robust impact reporting as opposed to abstract qualitative reporting.
These recommendations are useful for the land reform project and could potentially accelerate efforts at equitable access to land without compromising the far-reaching and often-questioned section 25 ownership rights guaranteed by the Constitution. DM
Thuto Gabaphethe and Lulama Madyaka are both based at the Home, Land and Rural Democracy programme at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Wits University.