Proposals to Policymakers to Transform Land Administration and Secure Tenure for Unregistered Land Rights in South Africa

The policy brief advocates for an evidence-based approach to transforming land administration in South Africa, specifically addressing off-register rights in urban and rural settings. It highlights that current formal registration systems fail to capture the social and customary norms governing land use, such as 'family houses' in cities and household-level rights in rural areas. The author argues that a comprehensive, transformed land administration system is necessary to record these diverse tenures and resolve disputes administratively rather than relying solely on constrained common-law court remedies.

• Urban areas in South Africa possess locally managed, though officially unrecognised, systems for regulating land access and trading, which are often coherent social tenures based on local oversight and flexibility.
• The 'family house' in South African metropolitan areas is a social form of property where collective family relationships persist after an elder's death, often conflicting with formal title deeds that register a single individual as the owner.
• Courts in Gauteng have seen an increase in disputes over family houses where the registered owner sells property without the consent of family members who viewed the owner as a custodian; however, courts remain limited by common-law remedies.
• In rural customary tenure systems, land rights are strongest at the household or family level and are akin to ownership, contradicting the colonial notion of communal tenure and the view that land is controlled solely by traditional councils.
• Rural land administration is typically decentralised, with headmen, neighbours, and committees playing the primary role in validating land requests and resolving disputes, whereas government proposals tend to centralise administration at the traditional council level.
• The Permission to Occupy (PTO) system, once widespread in former homelands, was largely discontinued after the 1990s, and despite a 2021 KwaZulu-Natal High Court directive to reinstate PTO regulations for Trust-held land, no steps had been taken to do so by the end of 2024.

APA

Wicomb, W. (2025). Proposals to Policymakers to Transform Land Administration and Secure Tenure for Unregistered Land Rights in South Africa. Public Affairs Research Institute. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250127_Land_LRCPolicyBrief3_Wicomb-1.pdf

Chicago

Wicomb, Wilmien. Proposals to Policymakers to Transform Land Administration and Secure Tenure for Unregistered Land Rights in South Africa. Public Affairs Research Institute, 2025. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250127_Land_LRCPolicyBrief3_Wicomb-1.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Wicomb |first1=Wilmien |title=Proposals to Policymakers to Transform Land Administration and Secure Tenure for Unregistered Land Rights in South Africa |publisher=Public Affairs Research Institute |date=January 2025 |url=https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250127_Land_LRCPolicyBrief3_Wicomb-1.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{wicomb2025proposals, author = {Wicomb, Wilmien}, title = {{Proposals to Policymakers to Transform Land Administration and Secure Tenure for Unregistered Land Rights in South Africa}}, institution = {Public Affairs Research Institute}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250127_Land_LRCPolicyBrief3_Wicomb-1.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }