![]() Since their passage in the mid-nineties, it has been more usual for the courts rather than the executive to affirm the rights in law. While the 'rights' laws (see footnote 1) have significantly mitigated the worst effects of arbitrary evictions and other forms of dispossession, they have proved to be a short-term palliative rather than a durable long-term solution. In local communities, there is a vibrant process of asserting claims and effecting transfers, but at the level of central government, land rights, though more protected, are legally murkier than before. Two decades into democracy, there is little evidence that a significant shift in the formal property structure has occurred. The expectation was that there would be a more equitable spread of property rights and a shift in power relations, thus effecting a change in the socio-economic structure of society. ![]() These nevertheless had to be balanced against other rights within the legal property structure. The poor majority on farms, in informal settlements and in communal areas could claim certain 'rights' to land without requiring authentication by formal title. These laws irrevocably redefined land-tenure relations in South Africa. This was in response to the urgent need to address tenure insecurity in the aftermath of the transition to democracy, in line with the Constitutional injunction (s 25) for secure tenure for all South Africans. ![]() In the mid-1990s a range of protective land-tenure legislation, applicable to unregistered land rights across the rural and urban landscape, was passed. The role of title deeds is a particularly thorny one. Many issues cloud the mattter of secure and unequal land tenure in South Africa. For a system of land records to succeed, its design must take into account well understood and familiar local and customary processes for holding, using and transmitting land in urban and rural areas. Converting these rights to title deeds may seem self-evident, but our research reveals major stumbling blocks. A staggering two thirds of the citizenry hold off-register land rights. Rosalie Kingwill, 22 August 2017 Renewed emphasis in policy discourses on systematic land titling to solve insecure tenure in South Africa is understandable.
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