Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa December/ January 2018/2019 | Page 12

PROPERTY REFORM
Khaya Lam Land
Reform Project
Leading true reform in property titles
BY NEALE PETERSEN
T
he Khaya Lam ‘my home’ project is an incredible
property initiative led by the Free Market Foundation
(FMF) headed up by Leon Louw as CEO and Temba
Nolutshungu who as Director is driving the project. It aims to
secure the property rights of between 5 – 7 million previously
dispossessed families in South Africa by giving them the title
deeds to their homes.
Temba says, “It is the best value charitable donation that
you can possibly make in South Africa. Your donation of
R2 250 gives a family living in a municipal rental home in a
poor community an asset of a R100 000*” (Based on estimated
average house prices).
Background to Khaya Lam (My Home) Land
Reform Project?
Under the apartheid government, millions of South Africans
were unfairly dispossessed of their land. Khaya Lam aims to
correct these injustices by helping black South Africans secure
title deeds to council-owned properties in which they have
lived for decades.
The FMF’s Khaya Lam (My Home) land reform initiative
delivers real economic empowerment of home ownership to
township residents deprived of their dignity and rights under
apartheid by facilitating the conversion of council owned rental
properties into freehold title - at no cost to the recipients. 
Titling in South Africa is a painstaking process complicated
by lack of records of ownership and bureaucratic complexity.
That municipalities and sponsors are willing to invest time
and funds to achieve home ownership for disadvantaged
communities is a testament to the goodwill and drive to right
the evils of apartheid which are still evident in South African
society today.
In South Africa, ownership of fixed property is not secure
until you have a Title Deed. Although, by a stroke of a pen,
thousands of occupants of rental properties became legal
owners of their homes in 1991, they received no documents
confirming their ownership rights. The FMF created the
Khaya Lam project to show the way to dealing with the
problem.
The 1913 Natives Land Act prohibited black South Africans
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DECEMBER 2018/JANUARY 2019 SA Real Estate Investor Magazine
Temba Nolutshungu, Director FMF & Leon Louw, CEO FMF
from owning land in so-called ‘white areas’ – restricting the
question of land ownership entirely to the ethnic authorities
in the reserves, later known as homelands. Black people in
the cities thus lived as tenants on property owned by the local
municipality, which developed into what we know today as
‘townships’. Not much has changed and as many as 5 million
families still live as tenants or without ownership rights across
SA. Khaya Lam offers hope to these citizens 20 years after the
end of apartheid.
FMF executive director Leon Louw said, “Black land
deprivation was probably the single worst element of the
colonial and apartheid eras and little has changed since
1994. Between 5 million and 7 million black and coloured
families still live as tenants or without ownership rights in
houses they have lived in for generations. There has been no
systematic conversion of these ‘council owned’ and ‘traditional
community’ properties to full, unrestricted ownership”.”
For over 40 years the Free Market Foundation (FMF)
has championed the cause of converting the various forms of
Apartheid title found in the townships to full, unambiguous
ownership for the current tenants. 
About Free Market Foundation (FMF)
The FMF is an independent, non-profit, public benefit
organisation, created in 1975 by pro-free market business
and civil society national bodies to work for a non-racial,
free and prosperous South Africa. As a policy organisation it