Honourable Speaker/Chairperson, Honourable Members, Fellow South Africans,
In 1969, I was born in the Eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth, but in 1978 my family moved to Mdantsane (a township outside East London). My father was the first in his family to obtain a Form 1 certificate -if you are old enough, you would know how important it was to have grade 8 at the time. I lived with my parents, six siblings, my grandmother and two other relatives.
In both our stays in Port Elizabeth and Mdantsane, the 12 of us stayed in a four-roomed house like an RDP house (but of course they were of better quality).
Inthe evenings, the lounge and kitchen would double up as extra bedrooms. During the holidays and weekends, Icould not sleep past 6am as I was sleeping next to the kitchen door and would be blocking early morning traffic. Butwhat was more painful to my parents was not owning thehousethey lived in. Instead, they had a 99-year lease.
In 1983 we were on the move again as my father got transferred to Alice. It was in Alice where my father’s dream of owning property became a reality. He bought a three-bedroom house with two outside rooms, a lounge, a dining room and a kitchen.
By our standards this was to us, a mansion, given the four-roomed houses we used to occupy.
Whilst my siblings and I were excited and marveling about the extent of our new home, my father was a proud and relieved man that he finally could own a property his children could call home.
In case some of you are too young to remember, in November 1959, the Democratic Alliance’s earliest predecessor, the Progressive Party was formed by a group of progressives who left the United Party after the latter in its congress earlier that year passed resolutions that would deny natives civil liberties-amongst those was the right to own land.
To this day the DA has stood firm in the resolve of its founding fathers. We remain opposed to the proposed constitutional amendment thatwill give the state sweeping powers to expropriate land without compensation and turn property ownership to long-term leases just like my late father’s.
Alan Straton
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