Abstracts

44 any property that South Africa currently has contractual obligations to protect under the surviving clauses of any BITs. Either of these measures will compromise some of the spiritual/cultural punch of EWC. However, they are a necessity in order to affirm the nation’s commitment to being an attractive trade partner to foreign nations and investors. Whether or not the draft Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill or any other EWC legislation passes through Parliament, the South African government must be prepared for continued social unrest related to the land issue. The common denominators of land reform in South Africa’s 25 years of democracy have been failed promises, corruption, underfunding, deference to traditional leaders, and lack of legislative specificity. South Africans have little consensus about what land reform should mean in terms of method, scale, rate, and so forth. The emotional divisiveness pertaining to EWC is reflective of this lack of consensus. Radically increased funding, transparency, confrontation of traditional leaders, a commitment to legislative specificity, and active record keeping (in the form of a national land audit) all present much more reasonable policy paths than EWC. Most importantly, the Republic of South Africa must recommit itself to funding land reform and land redistribution. The funding of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (renamed Department of Agriculture, Land Reform, and Rural Development) is regularly less than 1% of the national budget, with only 0.2% of the national budget dedicated to land redistribution (Mahlati et al., 2019). The South African government needs to provide significantly more funding, without which it is impossible to judge the potential efficacy of most of the nation’s land reform policies. If a fair resolution of South Africa’s land reform policy is ever to happen, the government must discern a way to find additional funding within an already tightly strapped budget.