South Africa’s parliamentary Portfolio Committee on International Relations and Cooperation has entered a strange world in which policies championed by the government are now being presented as misrepresentations designed to harm the country’s national interest.

In a statement issued on Monday, committee chairperson Supra Mahumapelo disputed claims that South Africa’s Expropriation Act permits expropriation without compensation and that black economic empowerment amounts to racial discrimination. He further argued that such claims threaten investment, jobs, and the national interest.

There is a remarkable contradiction here.

Parliament itself passed the Expropriation Act, which explicitly provides for no compensation or compensation below market value in the event of expropriation. The government has also previously expropriated mineral and water rights without compensation. It also legislated broad-based black economic empowerment, under which race is an express consideration in determining economic opportunities.

Successive governments, from the president down, have championed these policies as central achievements of democratic South Africa. They have also repeatedly defended them against criticism that they undermine investment and economic growth.

Yet when critics point to the government’s own statements and even the parliamentary record, the foreign affairs committee responds that this threatens the country’s economic interests.

It is a peculiarly Kafkaesque position for a parliamentary committee to find itself in, particularly when Parliament itself enacted the laws under discussion. The only way to make sense of it is that the committee must believe that the investment harm arising from the government’s policies comes from investors finding out about them. That, of course, itself makes no sense because it makes no sense, hence Kafka.

[Kafkaesque describes a situation that is absurd, illogical, contradictory, and often oppressive, particularly when involving government or bureaucracy. The word comes from the writer Franz Kafka, whose novels portrayed people trapped in bewildering bureaucratic systems where logic and common sense no longer seem to apply].

Either the government should stand up and defend its policies on their merits or reform them. Denying that the policies exist or that their provisions are what they are simply further exposes the damage they do.