Starting from scratch after forced removal

Starting from scratch after forced removal
By Anna Weekes

Walter Siyacela Ndenza came to the city from rural Bizana in 1990 looking for a better life. He first rented a shack in Mayville, just outside the city but then bought a shack for R800 in Lusaka informal settlement, equally close to the city.

“Buying my own shack was some kind of progress”, Siyacela said. With the little money he earned as a casual construction labourer in the nearby suburb of Reservoir Hills, Siyacela bought two lawnmowers and sought work in the suburb cutting lawns. This is how he supported his three dependents. But when the Lusaka community was forcibly removed by the ANC Ethekwini municipality, municipal police smashed one of the lawnmowers irreparably and broke the other one, which is now under repair.

“They broke my machine when they were destroying everything else we owned,” said Siyacela. “Now I am reduced to making helicopters out of wire whereas I only did this before in winter when the demand for grass cutting was low. Not a lot of people buy these wire toys, and it takes about two days to make one. I have to pay to fix the lawnmower broken by the municipality with money I don’t have. I also have to replace the other goods that were smashed by the municipal police.”

Siyacela is one of 19 families who were forcibly removed from Lusaka informal settlement on 6th November. The shacks of the Lusaka 19 were totally demolished, the residents lost many possessions and they were not provided with alternative accommodation. For want of anywhere else to go, they rebuilt their shacks on the lawn outside their Councillor’s office. After four days living there, they were arrested for ‘trespassing’ and spent three days in jail * this despite the legal norm for first offenders on trespassing charges that they should not be held in jail but released on a warning.

Six of the Lusaka 19 are women who desperately tried to rescue a few possessions, carrying them to jail wrapped up in blankets on their backs. The men were not allowed to take anything. When charges were withdrawn in the Durban Magistrates Court, the Lusaka 19 had nowhere to go. Knowing a few people from the Kennedy Road informal settlement Abahlali base Mjondolo (Shack Dwellers Movement), the Lusaka 19 walked about 20kms to the Kennedy Road community hall, where they slept for about a week. A municipal waste truck had been at the councillor’s office during the court hearing, removing all their furniture and only some of this was returned to the Kennedy Road Hall.

The direct action of the Lusaka 19, media coverage of police brutality against a march of the Abahlali base Mjondolo the same day and pressure from university academics created some pressure on the ANC municipality. The Lusaka 19 were offered houses in Mount Moriah, a community over 30kms away from Lusaka, built under electricity pylons. The Lusaka 19 chose to accept the houses because they were houses, not shacks and because they were told by the court that they would be arrested if they returned to Lusaka or the councillor’s lawn.

Having been forcibly removed to a place where they never wanted to live, the 19 families now have many psychological and financial difficulties to overcome. Siyacela has three dogs. When his shack was smashed and he was taken to prison, there was nobody to look after the dogs for three days. If such a plight befell dogs in white South Africa, there would be a national media outcry. Luckily the dogs were okay. Two of the dogs have now moved to Mount Moriah but one refuses to come and is living on its own in Lusaka. This has placed extra stress on the family who need to return to Lusaka daily to try to persuade the dog to move to the new place.

Sonwabiso Ndenza says he is also one of Siyacela’s dependents because he is sick and can no longer work. Both men say that in Lusaka a strong social network existed and they were able to eke out some kind of meagre existence on the casual jobs they did in Reservoir Hills. “I had customers whose houses I could walk to with my lawnmower,” says Siyacela. “Now they are calling me to cut their grass and I can’t deliver. In any case I can’t take my lawnmower on two taxis to Reservoir Hills.”

There are no roads in this new section of Mount Moriah and no shops, clinics or schools anywhere in sight.

The homes in Mount Moriah have water but only for the next two years and after that, pre-paid water meters will be installed. They have no ceilings and seem to be built precariously on sites cut out of the clay hillside. Dubious, unstable washing lines come with the houses. Siyacela’s washing line fell down during the interview, all the clean clothes landing in the mud. Most of the houses have pre-paid electricity which nobody can afford. Siyacela’s house has not been fitted with electricity at all.

The housing project itself is built in a highly dubious way. Most of the money is not spent on the workers or the building materials, but is kept as profit by the contractor. The government pays the private contractor between R31 000 and R35 000 per house, although the value of the houses are under R10 000 each. The private company then outsources the building to subcontractors. The actual workers are paid virtually nothing. For every roof they put on a house, workers reportedly get paid R8. A worker would have to roof more than 20 houses in one day to earn anywhere near what constitutes a living wage * clearly an impossible task. Subcontractors are paid R60 to install plumbing in an entire house. The corruption going on here calls into question the quality of the houses themselves.

“I want the government to be compassionate because their actions have destroyed a lot of families in Lusaka” says Siyacela. “Our valuable goods were broken. Also, we tried to negotiate with the government when they told us they intended to move us. Our attempts to negotiate only left us facing a lot of intimidation. Suddenly, out of the blue, the government came in full force to smash our shacks. This is not the way to treat people. All of us have to start from scratch buying the bare essential furniture and clothes that we already had.”

“We need to be compensated because it’s just not fair that we have to buy all the stuff we had before. We were only given 30 minutes to take all our belongings out of our shack but during those 30 minutes they already started breaking our things. Others of us were at work and didn’t have a chance to rescue anything.”

Sayinela Silenge moved from Port Shepstone to Lusaka in 2002. He is fairly happy so far that he has a house in Mount Moriah, which he says is better than living in a shack. But he says “It wasn’t nice being forcibly removed. It wasn’t decent. I lost a lot of valuable things. We moved to the Councillor’s lawn after our shacks were destroyed to show we are against forced removal and we want housing. The Mayor saw us as some kind of irritant and hence decided to throw us in jail. Even though the authorities thought it was childish of us to occupy the Councillor’s garden, we made our point through this action. Before, the Mayor was just running around and not listening but now he had to talk to us.”

Sayinela’s financial situation is as precarious as the rest of those forcibly removed. He has always been unemployed but in Lusaka he, like other residents, worked casually in construction in the nearby Reservoir Hills suburb. “I still have to figure out a way to survive in Mount Moriah because there is no suburb nearby. It’s a real predicament. We are a family of three but nobody is working”.

Sayinela is very unhappy that he has been forcibly removed in the post-apartheid era. “The way we got these houses was not exciting. In fact, I am very disturbed that before we got houses, we first had to be thrown into jail. This is not logical. I don’t understand why we were arrested in the first place because the call for a house is a legitimate one. We shouldn’t be persecuted for wanting a place to live”.

Lumka Msutwana is from Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape and also moved to Lusaka in 2002 to be close to the city. “It was really nice in Lusaka because the transport to town was not as expensive as it is here. Here, taxis are scarce. I worked in Reservoir Hills as a domestic worker for about R20 per day, six days a week. After that I worked at a stall in town owned by someone else. When our shacks were destroyed, I told my boss that I was going through a hard time and would return to work in a few days. But then we got thrown into jail. After we were released, I went back to the stall but they didn’t want me anymore.”

“I am jobless now and have no prospects for jobs here. There are no people to hire me as a domestic. I’m now on my last cents and am planning to go into town and ask for work at any of the stalls so I can support my three kids. I am also without a bed because the municipal police destroyed it. It was a wreck so I left it behind. I want compensation for all the things they destroyed during the forced removal.”

There is no possibility for Lumka to go back to domestic work in Reservoir Hills because she was only paid R20 per day. The taxi fare from Mount Moriah to town is R5 and the fare from town to Reservoir Hills is R3. At R16 per day this would leave Lumka with a wage of only R4 per day. This is not even enough to buy a loaf of bread.

Public interest law organisations must support groups like the Lusaka 19 in taking up a legal case for compensation for their destroyed belongings. People living in urban squatter camps are among the most marginalised in South Africa. Yet there is a longstanding illegal practice of the municipal police (and the private security forces who often help them) to wilfully destroy each and every belonging owned by a shack dweller (including clothes!) In Mandela Park, Cape Town, evicted people have even had books and loaves of bread destroyed by municipal police.

In addition, two female members of the Lusaka 19 have been left homeless because of bureaucratic bungling between the Department of Home Affairs and the Ethekwini Municipality’s housing department. The Housing Department will not issue the single mothers with keys for their houses because they do not have identity books. The Department of Home Affairs will not issue their identity books before next February.

In the past, other Mount Moriah residents have complained about a high rate of cancer and miscarriages that they say comes from living under electricity pylons. Nobody has told the Lusaka 19 about this yet.

It is disturbing to witness how, having been left with absolutely nothing, residents are hankering after the highly exploitative and underpaid casual work they used to do in Reservoir Hills. The Lusaka 19 have been dumped into a situation of abject poverty and utter hopelessness as a result of their forced removal, which can only worsen greatly in the near future.