PIE in our face
Talk about amending eviction law should turn into action
More than a quarter-century ago, Parliament passed the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act. Few laws carry a holier aura. PIE is the statute that promised an end to midnight bulldozers and forced removals. It translated section 26(3) of the Constitution (no eviction without a court order) into a legislative tool ordinary people could invoke. In the 2005 Port Elizabeth judgment, the Constitutional Court wrote that PIE infuses “grace and compassion into the formal structures of the law.” Hard to argue with grace and compassion.
Yet here we are, in 2025, knee-deep in unintended consequences. Ask the pensioner in who has spent three winters in a wendy house behind her own home because she cannot afford the legal fees to evict strangers squatting in her lounge. Ask the farmer in the KZN Midlands who watches syndicates peg out plots on his crop fields every election season, secure in the knowledge that evictions will dribble through court for years. Ask cash-strapped municipalities (those that actually try) why they burn millions on constant security for vacant land instead of laying sewer pipes. PIE’s halo blinds many to these daily distortions of justice.
I hold, as most people do, that a rule-of-law society must protect the vulnerable. But that same society must also protect property rights, because without clear and enforceable ownership the poor never truly climb out of poverty. They simply trade one uncertainty for another. And a decent legal order can do both. Hence why the PIE Act requires urgent amendment and the talk about these amendments, which have been ongoing for years, must now progress to actual doing.
Separating Desperation from Bad Faith
The first proposed change to PIE which I would suggest, is introducing “land invader” as a term for those who orchestrate or profit from unlawful occupation. It is not aimed at the desperate family that throws up a shack on the fringe of Khayelitsha but rather targets organisers, the men who arrive with a clipboard, a stack of plastic pegs and an empty cash bag ready to receive payment. Currently these middlemen rarely face sanction as the law fixes its gaze on the occupier, not the recruiter. By naming the mischief, we can prosecute the mischief.
The Act requires a narrow, conduct-specific offence of inciting or profiting from invasion which respects individual autonomy while reaffirming that freedom is bounded by others’ rights. It also addresses the truth of the matter that in most invasions, the poorest actors are pawns in an enterprise closer to racketeering than protest. We need not treat them as equal wrongdoers, but we must break the business model that feeds on their insecurity.
Critics hear “amend PIE” and picture the return of bulldozers. But a draft amendment should propose nothing of the sort. Section 4 should be amended and tightened to let courts consider the intent behind an occupation and the impact on the owner when the occupiers have been there less than six months. Judges still weigh health, income, the presence of children—everything they weigh today. But they will also weigh malice, a factor strangely absent from the courts current calculus.
Re-balancing Duties
Section 26 of the Constitution guarantees that “everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing” and that “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.” But like many socio-economic rights, the mere proclamation of the right does not conjure bricks, budgets, or the actual building of houses.
PIE’s framers assumed that municipalities would steadily extend formal housing and that temporary accommodation would indeed be temporary. Reality disagreed. The Blue Moonlight saga of the mid-00s showed cities could not shift housing obligations onto private owners, but it also revealed the perverse incentive that once a court orders emergency shelter, the temporary often becomes permanent.
PIE’s section 4 therefore requires revision to recognise finite resources (as section 26(2) of the Constitution does in text). PIE should allow a judge, in clear cases of land invasion or bad faith, to grant eviction without obliging the municipality to find alternative accommodation. The safety net remains for bona fide poor households. But where occupiers arrived with malice or under the tutelage of a pay-to-squat syndicate the state is not forced to reward the tactic.
And before the predictable housing-rights chorus starts protesting, no this is not cruelty, it is necessary triage. Social spending must prioritise families who wait in line, not those who push to the front. Nothing breeds social anger faster than watching law-abiding residents sidestepped by queue-jumpers who then enjoy government-funded services. Any constitutional order relies on popular consent and perceived unfairness corrodes that consent.
Protecting the Owners
PIE’s procedural hurdles (notices, multiple hearings, social reports) are only manageable (and barely so) to large landlords and state entities who have deep pockets. The hardest stories regarding the unintended consequences of PIE involve ordinary people. A widow renting out a back room, a black middle-class family fighting to move into their own newly bought flat. For them, a single lawyers’ letters costs a week or two’s grocery money. Amendments are required to give criminal sentences for organisers who charge “fees” to place occupants and expedited evictions should be legislated where occupation is short and plainly opportunistic.
Critics will retort that the Constitution already guards owners. True, but rights on paper do not pay attorneys. By pruning the mandatory procedural steps in straightforward cases, an amendment to PIE can give effect to property rights that exist in theory but often fail in practice. When property rights collapse, the first casualties are rarely the rich. The rich are able to insure, litigate, lobby and worst case scenario simply find another house. It is the modest owner who loses a life’s savings. The very self-reliant class that South Africa preaches of creating but in practice doesn’t.
When reforming PIE we must keep one eye fixed on history. We dare not revive the 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act in new clothes. Proposed changes should not criminalise homelessness but they must criminalise coercion and profiteering. They should not authorise midnight evictions but they must clarify when a judge may prioritise an owner’s rights. They should not strip poor families of recourse but they should supplement our courts’ toolbox so it can tailor justice, rather than issue one-size-fits-all orders as limited by the current legislation.
Shielding every unlawful occupier in the name of compassion is a kindness that boomerangs. As Frederic Bastiat warned:
“When plunder becomes a way of life… men create for themselves a legal system that authorises it.”
If we elevate occupation-without-consent into a protected status, we don’t lift the downtrodden. We normalise plunder. The winners are often the syndicate boss and the loudest queue-jumper and the losers are the patient families stuck on a waiting list, the first time title-deed owner, and the city forced to divert money from water mains to litigation.
Real compassion means drawing a clear line to help the genuinely homeless, yes, but pull the plug on organised lawlessness before it hollows out the very system that should lift people out of poverty.
Conclusion
Thomas Sowell reminds us that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” That’s the quiet wisdom hiding behind this whole argument. We can either keep a law that dignifies the dispossessed yet steadily corrodes the property rights of everyone else, or we can tune it so that compassion and discipline travel together.
Will the changes end land invasions, cure the housing backlog, and restore municipal balance sheets overnight? Of course not. But a law that no longer rewards bad faith is a start. Amend PIE, and we trade a brittle idealism for a sturdier fairness that fulfills the Constitution’s promise of dignity and the protection of property rights for all.
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