| Overview : South Africa`s has had a difficult history of colonisation, systematic dispossession and simultaneous legalisation of such dispossession in euro-centric and Roman Dutch Law based perspectives of people to land relationships. Section 25(6) and (9) of the Constitution envisages the institutionalisation of a “legally secure” tenure system. Since the dawn of democracy, the trajectory was to take up laws created immediately prior to 1994 and generally focused towards the spaces engineered by colonialism and apartheid: i) Policies for the upgrading of tenure by those in communal areas; ii) Policies and legislation on tenure for Restitution of Land Rights beneficiaries, and the same for iii) Labour Tenants, iv) farm-dwellers and workers. There was also development of new legal instruments for holding land that is restored or redistributed by the state, those include Trusts, Communal Property Associations, and others. The constitution also makes provision for traditional leadership with its own contested history as the processing of disputes in paramountcy’s indicates, however a dominant position common amongst is that the land is theirs that they hold on behalf of the people, they increasingly contest their role in relation to the municipality and service and delivery planning in their areas as well as the Communal Property Institutions usurping land portion’s within their jurisdiction; Their views have become increasingly resolute and farm off that which was envisaged in the White paper on land Reform;1.3 Increasingly over the last 18 years there have been serious Constitutional Court Judgements that need to be framed and managed through policy design and strategically communicated to the various contestants to tenure models. It is in this regard that UNDP together with the Department of Land & Rural Development requires services of a Research Instition to provide collation, analytical and initial compliance advise and technical support to drafting a Land Tenure Reform Framework Policy for South Africa |
