EWC case heads for the courts

22 September 2025 — What’s the background to the Driefontein EWC case? How did President Ramaphosa boost the DA’s election campaign? Why is Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero in hot water? What does Helen Zille’s run for the Johannesburg mayorship mean? What impact could the Madlanga Commission have? How does the Kennedy bill increase US pressure on SA?

EWC case heads for the courts

South Africa has another concrete test of expropriation without compensation (EWC) moving toward court: the City of Ekurhuleni’s 2019 seizure of Portion 406 of the Farm Driefontein, which is about 34ha in extent, for a housing scheme, with an ‘offer’ of R0 compensation.

The municipality valued the property at roughly R26.5m in 2017, while the owner valued the land at R30m or more. The dispute has dragged on for six years, and mediation is reportedly set for 31 October, with an 18-day trial pencilled in for February 2026.

The City of Ekurhuleni is pursuing this expropriation under the old Expropriation Act of 1975, in part because the new Expropriation Act of 2024, which allows the government to take property for “nil” compensation on an open-ended list of cases, has not yet legally been brought into force.

The facts of the case are somewhat peculiar. The current owner bought the land, part of which had been a mine dump, for R1m in 2005. The land is “zoned” as agricultural but has been uninvested and unproductive for decades, while Ekurhuleni claims that “not much” is possible even if private investments were made into the land. Furthermore, the property is encumbered with roughly R3.4 million in unpaid debts to the municipality.

A crucial feature of this case is that the expropriated owner applied to rezone the land for residential development in 2018, which was opposed by nearby “residents”, according to Ekurhuleni. This has the double effect of keeping the land’s value down and creating the artificial scarcity of residential land in the area. Ekurhuleni then claimed that both of those factors justify “nil” compensation in legal documents.

While the facts have not been independently verified, it appears that Ekurhuleni is conducting a form of lawfare that harms both the owner and those who would benefit from a housing development on the land in question, which is near to thoroughfares to business centres.

The case amplifies downstream risk channels for South African businesses and investors if, contrary to expectations, it is not squashed by the courts. A win for Ekurhuleni would lead to collateral erosion over and above what has already been priced in since the new Expropriation Act was passed.

External pressure lends additional weight to the case. The US has already linked EWC to broader bilateral tensions via President Trump’s February executive order, which flagged South Africa’s expropriation law and triggered aid cuts.

Businesses exposed to expropriation risk should engage early with organised business and civil society groups tracking the Act and this case. Organisations such as IRR Legal and Sakeliga are challenging the new Expropriation Act on the grounds of constitutionality.

Ramaphosa hands the DA a gift

As part of the long run-up to the local government elections, the African National Congress (ANC) gathered over 4,800 of its 4,929 municipal councillors at a “roll call” meeting in Johannesburg. Among many exhortations to do better, such as “it’s either service delivery or death”, Mr Ramaphosa told the delegates that they should seek inspiration from municipalities run by the Democratic Alliance (DA).

He said: “We need to ask ourselves: what is that they [the DA] are doing that is better than what we are doing? There is nothing wrong with us saying we want to go and see what Cape Town is doing. We want to go and see what Stellenbosch is doing. How do they craft everything? We need to be moving up the ladder of being good at what we do. We cannot forever stay at the bottom.” For good measure, the party’s national chairperson, Gwede Mantashe, said, “I know that we have a lot of singing councillors, but we have no councils. We all sing well, but capacity dololo.”

Mr Ramaphosa’s comments have provided the DA with ammunition it can use in political campaigning and have likely contributed to the accelerating decline of the ANC. The Sunday Times reports an ANC minister as saying: “If [President Ramaphosa] thinks the DA is outperforming the ANC, maybe he should step down. It’s a political blunder we may not be able to survive.”

Morero faces a grilling

The current executive mayor of Johannesburg, Dada Morera (ANC), faced a hostile parliamentary portfolio committee last week, which said it was “perturbed by the lackadaisical attitude” of Mr Morero towards resolving the city’s water problems.

Johannesburg Water, an entity owned by the city, reportedly has an infrastructure upgrade and renewal backlog of over R26 billion. Johannesburg residents are encountering frequent water interruptions and almost 45% of the water supplied by Johannesburg Water is not paid for.

Residents of the Johannesburg suburbs of Coronationville and Westbury have been suffering water shortages for several years. Two weeks ago, their frustration boiled over, and they barricaded streets with burning tyres, rocks and rubbish.

Mr Morero visited the community shortly thereafter and promised to restore supply within seven days. However, a week later water had not been restored in many areas and the mayor said it would take three more weeks to restore supply. A resident said: “The mayor’s promises are as empty as our taps.”

For all the president’s exhortations and the efforts of ANC councillors across the country, services are unlikely to improve significantly before the local government elections.

Zille throws her hat in the Johannesburg ring

On Saturday the DA announced that Helen Zille would be its mayoral candidate for Johannesburg in the upcoming local government elections. Given widespread dissatisfaction with the existing city administration, Ms Zille’s candidacy could galvanise a large-scale shift in voting patterns.

Should she win, however, she faces a mammoth undertaking. Johannesburg is plagued by daily service delivery outages, entrenched corruption in the public service, and negative sentiment.

The upside of a Johannesburg revival is profound, not only for the city and Gauteng, but for the whole country. As of 2023, over a third of all the assessed taxpayers in South Africa, or 35.5%, were registered in Gauteng. Of those, 36.2% lived in Johannesburg. Johannesburg generates approximately 16% of South Africa’s gross domestic product. Getting the city working again would produce widescale economic benefits for the country.

The Madlanga Commission kicks off

The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference, and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System, which started its work last week, represents a potential reckoning for the country’s law enforcement agencies. The commission chair, Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga, laid out the stakes clearly: “If the allegations are proved to be true, that spells doom for SA’s criminal justice system. A healthy justice system is key to the rule of law and, in turn, to a functioning constitutional democracy”.

In recent CRA engagements, international clients and audiences have spoken of their desire to invest in South Africa, but have added that the high rate of crime, along with the proliferation of various mafias, has deterred them.

The Madlanga Commission provides the ANC and South Africa with a further opportunity to deal with the consequences of cadre deployment and the politicisation of policing and intelligence, but whether the political will to do so exists remains unclear. Revelations emerging from the Commission have the potential to fuel internal conflict and to damage further the standing of the ANC at a time when it is politically vulnerable.

US Congress keeps up the pressure

In April, Congressman Ronny Jackson introduced a draft law calling for the relationship between South Africa and the United States to be reviewed in the House of Representatives. That bill was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee in August. It has now been matched by a bill introduced last week in the Senate by Senator John Kennedy.

The introduction of a Senate version matters because it shows momentum and ensures the issue will not stall in one chamber. Mr Jackson’s bill was the opening gambit; Mr Kennedy’s text gives the Senate a stronger hand and raises the chances that Congress will instruct the White House to act. The real target is the ANC leadership, and the risk of personal sanctions against senior party figures is now explicit.

Both bills focus directly on the South African government, requiring the US president to assess whether Pretoria undermines US national security and to identify senior ANC and government figures for targeted sanctions.

For markets and investors, the message is that Washington’s stance toward South Africa’s ruling party is hardening. The threat of losing the African Growth and Opportunity Act may be outdated in the Trump tariff environment, but the bills illustrate a deeper intent to penalise Pretoria’s alignment with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. For South African businesses, this signals that even greater turbulence may lie ahead in their commercial relationships with the US.