Land expropriation without compensation: a study of constructions of the Parliamentary process in selected mainstream and "ground-up" media from 27 February "“ 12 August 2018

Abstract

This study investigates the constructions of land expropriation without compensation (LEwC) in the discourses of two mainstream media, Moneyweb and City Press, and two ground-up platforms, Afriforum and the African Farmers' Association of South Africa (AFASA). It follows the February 2018 adoption by Parliament, of LEwC as a policy to reorder the country's unequal and racially bifurcated economy. The motivations for, and opposition to the policy locate land as 'the issue' in conquest and capitalism. How land is signified therefore, is important to the understandings of 'restitution' and/or 'resolution'. The news platforms selected here are diverse: Moneyweb focuses on investments. City Press concerns itself with politics. Afriforum and AFASA are alternative sphericules linked to ethnically- polarised quotidian concerns with land as a key focus. Discourses are central to how citizens see and construct themselves and one another as subjects. As such, media frames can be connected to justice and inter-'race' complexities. This is a study of media influences in cultivating certain meanings and understandings of tenuous and fractious political situations characterised by inequality and interracial enmity. The thesis draws from the Epistemologies of the South as well as Marxism to constitute the locus of its enunciation of colonisation, liberal capitalism, land question, justice, ideology, discourse, and framing. This framework is geared towards emic understanding of interrelated local and global contexts of the land question. Conceptual clarity is key to the development of an emancipatory imagination. Qualitative framing analysis and critical discourse analysis are used in this study to examine a diachronic corpus of 124 articles from the four platforms covering 167-days, from the adoption of the LEwC motion through the initial round of public hearings. The findings suggest a strong influence of the structures of coloniality in discourses across a wide political spectrum. The frames and counter-frames in the four platforms are simultaneously divergent and similar. Some are reactionary and conservative, others are liberal-transformational and even radical-prefigurative. All however, orbit around abyssal, North-centric, liberal capitalist normativity as the centripetal centre. The study proposes rethinking of the land question, a radical exorcism from land discourses, of structures of coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Their mobilisation, predominance and naturalisation in political communication is anti-transformation and helps keep Black South Africans to this day, under the heavy yoke of an oppressive colonial and Apartheid reality as perpetual economic slaves.