In conversation with Michael Aliber |
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The suggestion that the Deeds Registry ? the public register
of land ? will henceforth record the race and nationality of those purchasing
land is predictably causing a stir.
Among those who suspect sinister motives, the concern relates
to the Government?s ultimate purpose for collecting this information. But the
real question is not the imagined political implications, but the practical
question: what purpose, indeed, would be served by this approach?
The Deeds Registry was not created to generate data that can
be analysed for policy purposes. As elsewhere in the world, the purpose is to
ensure a legal record of property rights.
That said, the Registry has for a long while been used by some
people for information?s sake, in particular by property valuators, who often
seek to estimate the market value of a property by accessing information about
comparable sales; and by estate agencies, who try to gauge trends in property
markets. Over the past several years, the Chief Directorate Deeds Registration
has significantly improved the accessibility of its data, which in any event
are by law open to the public.
What it has not done, however, is to greatly change the type
of information recorded. Perhaps it is just that the Deeds Directorate has not
considered the other uses that its data could serve, for example, when a transaction
is registered with Deeds, the municipality in which it took place is not recorded.
As a result, the Deeds data are not generally useful to municipalities that
might wish to estimate the value of their property tax base. But potentially,
with just a bit of extra information, the Deeds data could greatly assist the
entire local government system. For whatever reason, the Deeds database is certainly
an underexploited resource.
It is worth considering what value would
be introduced by amending the information captured with property transactions
to reflect race and nationality |
Now comes the suggestion that Deeds should record the race
and nationality of landowners. In principle, this is not a bad thing. Suspicions
of sinister motives aside, when our debates are informed by data rather than
anecdotal evidence or speculation, we are in a better position to make good
choices.
But it is worth considering what value would be introduced
by amending the information captured with property transactions to reflect race
and nationality.
Let us examine the question of race. Everyone understands,
though not all accept, the Government?s imperative to redress the country?s
racial imbalance in land ownership. This is the reason for the Government?s
Land Reform Programme, much of which is explicitly redistributive.
The question that immediately arises in respect of the Deeds
proposal is, why it is necessary at all? Surely, the Department of Land Affairs
(DLA), which is responsible for land reform, knows how much land has been acquired
by blacks by means of its own direct interventions, just as the Department of
Housing must know how many RDP houses have been built?
While it is certainly true that the DLA?s data about its own
Land Reform Programme is not as good as it should be, clearly it should fix
the problem directly rather than rely on Deeds? information. Even if the Deeds
Registry starts to record race, it will be a blunt and simple instrument relative
to what it is expected to observe: land reform transactions constitute a tiny
fraction of all rural property transactions (generally less than 3% by area),
which in turn are far fewer than transactions of urban properties. Moreover,
the sort of information needed to really track land reform goes far beyond the
sort of data that Deeds can be expected to record.
There are three possible good reasons for amending the deeds
data capture system.
Firstly, still in the vein of measuring the progress of land
reform, an amended Deeds database could assist in keeping track of the extent
to which land transferred through land reform might revert to white owners.
Some land reform beneficiaries may choose, after a time, to resell their land,
while others may be forced to forfeit their land if they cannot service their
debts. Presently there is no formal mechanism for capturing such events, thus
we do not know if they might undo the gains made through land reform, or if
the land reforms are of no consequence.
Secondly, the Government might be interested in knowing how
much private land passes into, and out of, the possession of blacks outside
of the actual Land Reform Programme. This is indeed important to know, and the
Deeds database is the ideal vehicle.
Lastly, the Deeds database could, in principle, be amended
to allow for the tracking of patterns in foreign property acquisition. The question
of how much land is presently acquired by foreigners, and indeed whether foreigners
are driving up the land price, and thus hindering land reform, is one which
is all the more emotive for lack of comprehensive data.
However, there are two important challenges and one concern
that relate to the proposal.
The one challenge relates to whether the attempt to capture
race and nationality would be retrospective. It is one thing to change the data
capture protocol today, so that from this day forward the Deeds database has
the sort of information we desire, and quite another to determine the race composition
or nationality of the status quo. The latter is a far more demanding task, especially
for nationality (foreigners have been buying land in ?white? South Africa longer
than blacks have). Tracking incremental changes without knowing the base would
be interesting, but very incomplete.
The other main challenge is that much of South Africa?s privately
owned land, approximately 17%, is registered in the name of some legal entity
such as a trust, communal property associations, or a company, and not in the
name of natural persons.
There are ways, in principle, of depicting the race or nationality
of a legal entity (for example by looking at its ownership composition), but
doing so would likely place unreasonable demands on Deeds. Maintaining it would
simply be impossible.
An amended deeds database could assist
in keeping track of the extent to which land transferred through land
reform might revert to white owners |
As to the concern with the question of purpose and interpretation:
the use of the Deeds database to better establish trends in property ownership
patterns could, if conducted thoughtlessly, lend itself to further complicate
the problem of assessing South Africa?s land reform, namely, the obsession with
hectares.
From the time the RDP base document was published in 1994 with
mention of the target to redistribute 30% of agricultural land within the first
five years of the programme, the focus on hectares has remained paramount. This
is generally to the exclusion of more important considerations, such as numbers
of people, or even value.
The irony is that the collective market value of all of South
Africa?s commercial farmland represents but a fraction of the value of any one
of its metropolitan areas. Understanding the trends in numbers of black property
owners and the value of the properties that they own, be they urban or rural,
will be a better indication of economic transformation than the one-sided attention
to hectares that generally prevails now.
Dr Michael Aliber is a Research Director
in the Integrated Rural and Regional Development Research Programme.
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