“No Compensation” Is Not the Law: How the African Victims of South Africa’s 30 June Violence Can Claim What They Are Owed
A South African Minister has told the world that her government will not compensate the Africans who fled — and added that those with “legally registered” property may sell it. Thousands of traders, homeowners and investors heard one thing: you have no rights here. That is false. South African law, South Africa’s own Constitution, its state-owned riot insurer, its Equality Courts and the African human rights system all say otherwise. This guide is for the people who built something in South Africa and watched it burn. You are not beggars asking for a favour. You are claimants with a case — and the clock is running.
The Statement — and What It Carefully Left Out
Speaking to reporters in Pretoria after Nigeria’s government began documenting its citizens’ losses and pressed for redress, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni ruled out compensation for foreign nationals who fled the violence.
Now read that again slowly, because the sentence is doing two very different jobs at once — and only one of them is honest.
What she is actually refusing is narrow: a special ex gratia compensation fund, created by the executive and paid out as a diplomatic gesture, in response to a state-to-state demand from Abuja. A government is entitled to decline that. What her words are heard to mean — and what tens of thousands of terrified traders and homeowners understood them to mean — is something entirely different and entirely false: that an African who lost a shop, a home, a truck or a stock-room in South Africa has no legal claim against anyone.
That is not the law. It is not close to the law. And the Minister did not mention a single one of the remedies that South African law actually provides — not the state-owned insurer that exists precisely for riot damage; not the constitutional duty of the police to protect the inhabitants of the Republic; not the Equality Courts; not the Human Rights Commission; not the Protection of Investment Act her own Parliament passed. This is not a lie. It is something more corrosive: a truth arranged so that the frightened will draw the wrong conclusion. We are here to draw the right one.
Three Words in South Africa’s Own Constitution That Decide This Entire Question
Before any statute, any insurer, any court — start here. South Africa’s Bill of Rights is not a citizens’ club. Its drafters chose their words with precision, and those words are now the shield of every African who lost everything in June.
Section 205(3): the police must protect the inhabitants of the Republic and their property
The Constitution sets out the objects of the South African Police Service: to prevent, combat and investigate crime, to maintain public order, and to protect and secure the inhabitants of the Republic and their property. Not “the citizens.” The inhabitants. If you lived in South Africa, the SAPS owed you a constitutional duty to protect you and your property — and the question of whether it discharged that duty in June 2026 is a question for a court, not a press conference.
Section 25(1): no one may be arbitrarily deprived of property
“No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.” No one. Not “no citizen.” A mob is not a law of general application. Being chased from your home by vigilantes while the state stands by is the textbook definition of arbitrary deprivation.
The Bill of Rights guarantees dignity, life, security and access to courts to everyone
Equality before the law (s.9), human dignity (s.10), life (s.11), freedom and security of the person (s.12), and access to courts (s.34) are guaranteed to everyone — not to citizens alone. Only a handful of rights in the South African Constitution are reserved for citizens (such as voting and the right to a passport). The right to sue for what was taken from you is not one of them.
Seven Real Routes to Compensation
Here is what the Minister did not tell you. Not every route will fit every person, and none of them is automatic — each requires evidence, and most require a lawyer. But every one of them is real, and every one of them is open to a non-citizen.
SASRIA: South Africa’s state-owned riot and public-disorder insurer
Most people who lost a business or a home in June do not know this, and it may be the most valuable paragraph in this guide. Ordinary South African insurance policies exclude damage caused by riot, civil commotion, public disorder, strikes and terrorism. That is exactly why SASRIA (the South African Special Risks Insurance Association) exists — a state-owned insurer that covers precisely those risks, sold as a “coupon” attached to your normal short-term insurance policy through your ordinary insurer or broker.
SASRIA cover attaches to an insurable interest in property situated in South Africa. It is not a citizenship benefit. If you insured your shop, your stock, your vehicle, your home or your equipment, you may already hold SASRIA cover without ever having heard the name. After the July 2021 unrest, SASRIA settled claims running into billions of rand. The mechanism is proven, it is funded, and it is the state’s own.
A delictual claim against the Minister of Police for failing to protect you
South African law allows you to sue the state in delict when it negligently and wrongfully fails to perform a legal duty and you suffer loss as a result. The police’s duty to protect the inhabitants of the Republic and their property is a constitutional one (s.205(3)), and the South African courts have repeatedly held the state liable for negligent failures to protect — a line of authority running from Carmichele v Minister of Safety and Security (Constitutional Court) through Minister of Safety and Security v Van Duivenboden and Rail Commuters Action Group v Transnet.
The question a court will ask is simple and, in this case, uncomfortable for the state: the 30 June ultimatum was announced months in advance, in public, in the national press. Was the harm foreseeable? Was the state’s response reasonable? These are exactly the questions the state settles rather than answers. It will not be easy, it must be proved, and you will need a lawyer — but it is a real claim, and it belongs to non-citizens as fully as to citizens.
Lay a criminal charge and get your CAS (case) number
Whatever else you do, do this. Report the crime to the SAPS — arson, malicious damage to property, theft, robbery, assault — and obtain a written CAS/case number. Even if you have already left South Africa, a charge can be laid, and a lawyer or a civil-society organisation can assist you remotely or through your embassy.
The case number is the spine of your file. Insurers ask for it. Courts ask for it. The Human Rights Commission asks for it. And every prosecution of a perpetrator strengthens the record of state failure that underpins Pathway 2. The African Commission has explicitly demanded that South Africa prosecute “those involved in organising or inciting” these acts — not only those who struck the match.
The Equality Court, under the Equality Act (PEPUDA)
The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 prohibits unfair discrimination, harassment and hate speech, and it created Equality Courts, which sit in every magistrate’s court in the country. They are deliberately accessible: you can bring a complaint yourself, without an attorney, at minimal cost, using a simple form obtained from the clerk of the Equality Court.
And critically — an Equality Court can order payment of damages, an unconditional apology, and interdicts restraining further conduct. For a trader who cannot fund High Court litigation, this is the most realistic courtroom in South Africa.
Complain to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC)
The SAHRC is a constitutional body (s.184) with the power to investigate, to secure redress, and to litigate on behalf of complainants. Its services are free. It has already reported on the geography and drivers of this violence. A complaint costs you nothing, creates an official record, and can produce findings that support every other claim you bring.
The Protection of Investment Act 22 of 2015 — South Africa’s own promise to you
This is the promise South Africa made to the foreign investors it invited in. The Act expressly provides for the physical security of investments, requiring the Republic to accord foreign investors and their investments a level of physical security as generally provided to domestic investors in accordance with customary international law. It affirms that a foreign investor’s property rights are protected under section 25 of the Constitution, and it provides for mediation, and for access to South African courts, independent tribunals and statutory bodies.
Understand the limits honestly: South Africa terminated most of its old bilateral investment treaties and replaced them with this Act, which sharply narrowed investor-state arbitration. International arbitration is generally available only state-to-state, with government consent, after domestic remedies are exhausted. So this is not a shortcut to a foreign tribunal — but it is a written statutory duty of physical security that South Africa owes you, and it belongs in your lawyer’s letter.
The African and international human rights systems
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) receives individual communications against states party to the African Charter, generally after domestic remedies have been exhausted. It has already spoken on this crisis — its Country Rapporteur on South Africa, Commissioner Solomon Ayele Dersso, demanded that South Africa ensure victims obtain “effective remedies and reparations.” That is your language; use it.
One honest warning, so that no one wastes a year. Individuals and NGOs may bring cases directly to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights only where the state concerned has made the special declaration under Article 34(6) of the Court’s Protocol. South Africa has not made that declaration. The realistic African route is therefore a communication to the Commission, which may itself refer a matter to the Court. Anyone who tells you to file directly at the African Court against South Africa is wasting your time.
Beyond Africa: South Africa is a party to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), whose monitoring committee has already called on the country to “provide victims of discriminatory acts with adequate redress” and to protect their property — and to the ICCPR. Ask counsel to confirm the current status of individual-complaint mechanisms before relying on them.
Build the File. The File Is the Case.
Every pathway above lives or dies on evidence. A claim is not won by outrage; it is won by paper. Start today, even from another country, even from a phone. Every document you gather is money you may recover.
The Evidence File — assemble every item you can
The Deadlines That Can Kill Your Claim — Even a Good One
Read this section twice. A perfectly valid claim, with perfect evidence, dies if it is brought late. The law does not care how badly you were wronged if you missed the date.
Act on these now
Where to Get Help — Much of It Free
You Are Addressing Educated Africans. Speak to Us Accordingly.
Let me be very plain with Pretoria, and then very plain with our own people.
Madam Minister: the people you are addressing are not supplicants. They are entrepreneurs. They registered companies with your CIPC. They paid tax to your SARS. They employed South Africans, banked with South African banks, insured with South African insurers, and signed leases under South African law. They came because your government invited investment, and they built what your economy could not build for itself in those townships. And when the mob came, they discovered that the state which took their taxes would not defend their doors.
You are entitled to refuse a special fund. You are not entitled to leave a frightened people believing that they have no remedy in your country — because they do, and you know it. You did not mention SASRIA. You did not mention section 205(3), which obliges your police to protect the inhabitants of the Republic. You did not mention the Equality Courts, or the Human Rights Commission, or the Protection of Investment Act your own Parliament passed to reassure the world that South Africa keeps its word. To omit all of that, while insinuating that African-owned property might not be “legal,” is not governance. It is a message to a mob, dressed as a statement to the press. And it is beneath the country that gave the world its finest Constitution.
And to the Africans who lost everything, hear me. You are not begging. You are claiming. This is not charity you are seeking; it is law you are enforcing — their law, written by their own hand, in their own Constitution, which they read aloud to the world for thirty years while we applauded. Get your case number. Phone your broker and say the word SASRIA. Serve your notice within six months. Walk into an Equality Court with your file. Write to the Human Rights Commission. Make them answer you in the one language they cannot shout down: the language of their own statutes.
South Africa is burning bridges faster than two kings can build them. But the record is being kept — by the African Commission, by the courts, by the insurers, by the tax registers, and now by you, the claimants, file by file. Hate is expensive, and this is the invoice being written. No one is above the law — not a movement, not a mob, and not a Minister at a podium in Pretoria. Mwana washe muranda kumwe — even a chief’s child is a servant somewhere else. Every one of us is a foreigner in some country. Africa will remember how South Africa treated hers. Pamberi nekururamisira — forward with justice.
Leave a Reply