With expropriation without compensation having moved to the forefront of government policy in South Africa since 2008, the Social Research Foundation (SRF) has gone to great lengths to test public opinion on the subject.

Earlier this year, it asked South Africans whether they would support the government expropriating “their” property without compensation. The results were not surprising.

Just 8.4% of respondents said they would agree to that, whilst 56.7% said they would strongly oppose it – a ratio of 7 to 1 against.

More than 6 out of 10 South Africans said that if the government went ahead with such expropriations, the consequences would be damaging to the overall South African economy. Just 1 in 3 respondents disagreed with that.

Senior government leaders have confided in The Common Sense that the effects of large-scale expropriations would likely be devastating for the country’s economy, and that this is why, despite posturing to the contrary, the government had not used the laws at its disposal to seize investment capital and other goods in the country to date.