Category Archives: joe slovo

Thandeka, who suffers from epileptic seizures, illegally evicted from her home in Langa TRA by our corrupt committee

16 July 2012
Abahlali baseKwaLanga

Thandeka, who suffers from epileptic seizures, illegally evicted from her home in Langa TRA by our corrupt committee

This is the story of Thandeka Ngcelwane who, last week, was allocated No.59, a government built shack in Langa Temporary Relocation Area. However, while she was away from her new home for a few hours to visit her brother, the TRA committee headed by Zukisani Sibunzi broke the lock on her door and put someone else in the home. When she returned she found a lady in her home and her belongings removed – Thandeka had been illegally evicted from her home and, since her old shack in Joe Slovo was now demolished, she was left with nowhere else to go.

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Abahlali rises up to stop corruption and forced removals in Langa TRA

Abahlali baseLanga TRA – 5 July 2012
Abahlali baseMjondolo Western Cape Press Statement

Abahlali rises up to stop corruption and forced removals in Langa TRA

Yesterday, Abahlali baseMjondolo youth took physical action to block the Housing Development Agency from moving residents of Joe Slovo Informal Settlement into Langa Temporary Relocation Area calling the process corrupt and at the expense of current residents of the TRA.

 

 




 

 

The SANCO aligned TRA committee is selling TRA structures and houses with the tacit support of the HDA. Many of the current residents of the TRA have also been pushed off the housing lists and large-extended families are being counted as single families and therefore slated for eviction from the TRA once their relatives are allocated homes.

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The Times: ‘I don’t believe in voting anymore’

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/specialreports/elections2011/article1010864.ece/I-dont-believe-in-voting-any-more

‘I don’t believe in voting anymore’

Apr 10, 2011 2:25 AM | By BRENDAN BOYLE

Sarie Booi, better known as Ou Sis, is among many in Cape Town’s informal settlements who don’t intend voting on May 18 because they have given up on local government.

She is one of the original residents of Masincedane, a windswept settlement of some 70 shacks among the dunes of Strandfontein on the False Bay coast. It was started by her late father nearly 20 years ago, when he worked as a janitor in a children’s holiday camp.

There are enough toilets, there are a few taps and the rubbish is collected most weeks from a fly-infested skip, but the high-mast light hasn’t worked for two years, drugs are a problem even among pre-teen children and the promise of new houses has become a standing joke.

Irma Jackson, the DA councillor, says the cables powering the light are repeatedly stolen and she’s not sure the people want to move. “I’ve done my bit to assist them, but I get despondent because these people don’t seem to want to change their lifestyle,” she said.

That is not enough for Booi. “We don’t want to vote again. The people come for the election and they talk to us, but they never come back.”

In Joe Slovo, a highly politicised informal settlement on the edge of Cape Town’s flagship N2 Gateway housing project, the focus is on water and sanitation. Talking to Songezo Mjongile, the ANC’s Western Cape secretary, at her front door, Nosiphelo Ndlela, says things have improved during the past five years, but not enough to get her out to vote either for the DA, which she concedes is delivering something, or for the ANC, which is promising everything.

Ndlela says the council cleans the untarred road, fixes the lights within days and keeps the water flowing.

But what she wants is a house, and that seems no nearer than the last unkept promise, she says.

Anna-Magdalena Welcome is a pensioner in a small, neatly kept two-storey house in Mitchells Plain.

She has run up a R1600 water bill and is behind on the agreed R160-a-month payment, so, for the past five months, her supply has been cut to 350 litres a day – an amount that the council allows to everyone, regardless of whether they pay or not.

Mjongile believes Welcome illustrates the DA’s disregard for the plight of the poor.

The city government says cases like hers demonstrate its fair application of a R1.2-billion-a-year indigent policy that ensures everyone gets the basic services they need to survive.

In Thabo Mbeki, a settlement of about 500 shacks, the issue is sanitation.

Every shack has a numbered white plastic portable toilet, and the council sends a truck once a week to empty the 20-litre holding tanks. ANC ward councillor Thobile Gqola says the system is degrading. “Some people who can afford it have made an enclosure outside, but in most shacks you will find that somebody is cooking while somebody else is relieving himself on the porta-potty in the same room.”

ABM WC Welcomes Joe Slovo informal settlement constituional court judgement

http://www.khayelitshastruggles.com/2011/04/abahlali-basemjondolo-western-cape.html

ABM WC Welcomes Joe Slovo informal settlement constitutional court judgement

Abahlali baseMjondolo Western Cape welcomes the Joe Slovo Constitutional Court Judgement which was handed over Thursday last week. Which set aside the eviction order granted in June 2009.

While this is a victory for people of Joe Slovo who did not want to be evicted to Delft, we also note that:

1. If the previous Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu was not arrogant, and was willing to engage meaningfully with the residents of Joe Slovo the whole dispute between both parties would have been resolved outside the court and satisfactory decision to both parties would have been reached.

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M&G: Stay of eviction victory for residents

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-01-stay-of-eviction-victory-for-residents/

Stay of eviction victory for residents
KWANELE SOSIBO AND NIREN TOLSI JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – Apr 01 2011 00:00

The threat of mass evictions has been lifted from residents of Cape Town’s Joe Slovo informal settlement.

On Thursday the Constitutional Court discharged an earlier supervised eviction order handed down by the same court. The ruling allows residents to continue engaging with the government over an upgrade of the settlement.

The community, which numbers about 20 000 residents, had approached the court to fend off eviction by the state. The Western Cape and national housing departments wanted to develop the area into a public housing project.

In its June 2009 judgment the court handed down an eviction order and a supervisory execution order that insisted the state had to meet several timelines and other requirements. These included “meaningful engagement” between the community and the state over their removal and that it would provide alternative accommodation in temporary residential units of not less than 24 square metres, serviced by pre-paid electricity and with reasonable access to waterborne sewerage systems and communal ablution facilities. It required the state to provide transport for relocated residents to schools, places of work and healthcare facilities.

But the government did not adhere to the timetable regarding community engagement over relocation set out by the court. Instead, it expressed concern, about the project’s financial viability and the “social, financial and legal impact” on Joe Slovo residents of a relocation of “massive proportions” and it placed an in situ upgrading model on the negotiating table, saying that it had been “positively received by [residents] and their legal representatives”.

A full sitting of the court considered whether it was permissible for it to discharge and not vary its original order and, if so, the “circumstances in which this can be done”.

Irrelevant timetable

It found that it was “now common cause that the most likely course for the redevelopment of the Joe Slovo settlement area is in situ development” and that applicants would be asked to relocate only if new houses had been built and allocated to them.

The court found that the timetable had “become irrelevant” — there had been “little or no engagement on the relocation process” — and its stipulation of a 70%-30% split of the housing allocation in favour of residents was no longer applicable, as the government had given an assurance that the entire project would be for residents and former residents of Joe Slovo.

With these aspects of the original order having fallen away, the court found that “it cannot be just and equitable to leave [the eviction] order in place, more particularly because the order has been in suspension for more than a year”.

It discharged its original order with the exception that the developer, Thubelisha Homes, the Western Cape housing department and the national housing minister were still responsible for paying 50% of Joe Slovo residents’ legal costs.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein this week ordered the city of Johannesburg to provide temporary emergency accommodation by no later than June 1 this year to occupants of derelict buildings facing eviction.

The city had appealed against an earlier High Court judgment ordering it to provide alternative accommodation for about 100 people facing eviction from a privately owned former carpet factory in Saratoga Avenue, Berea. The owner is private property company Blue Moonlight Properties 39.

In the judgment, by Appeal Court Judge Mohamed Navsa and Acting Judge of Appeal Clive Plasket, the city’s housing policy was declared irrational, discriminatory and unconstitutional because, among other things, it drew a distinction between people it evicted from unsafe or “bad” buildings owned by private landowners and persons evicted by private landlords for other reasons. Furthermore, it was deemed “inflexible” in not allowing for the provision of temporary accommodation for persons evicted from privately owned land, even if they were desperately poor.

The court found the city had been vague about the affordability of meeting demands for housing as it had mostly addressed the costs involved in providing permanent housing as opposed to temporary emergency housing for occupants.

The full judgment, and the court’s explanatory note, are available online here.