Category Archives: Jeanne Hromnik

The Weekender: State turns against shack dwellers

http://www.theweekender.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=83638

State turns against shack dwellers

by Jeanne Hromnik

Published: 2009/10/10 09:03:17 AM

THE appellants in the Joe Slovo shack dwellers’ case against Thubelisha Homes might be forgiven for thinking the law is an idiot and an ass (and a bachelor, no doubt) after a recent ruling of the Constitutional Court.

Five Constitutional Court judges unanimously upheld last year’s high court ruling by Judge President John Hlophe that the 20000-strong community be evicted and relocated from the Joe Slovo informal settlement adjoining Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township, to Delft, 34km away.

Last month, a full bench of Constitutional Court judges suspended the court’s order indefinitely following an application by Housing Minister Tokyo Sexwale that expressed “grave concerns” about the “practical, social, financial and legal consequences” of the relocation.

In the context of the lengthy, ongoing struggle of Joe Slovo’s residents against the infamous N2 Gateway Housing Project for which they were to be relocated, it is difficult to see how the earlier decision overlooked such consequences.

It has become commonplace to compare the government’s relocation of shack dwellers with the forced removal policies of the apartheid government . The difference, however, is the recourse to law that the post-apartheid government has facilitated — which organisations such as the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, have been using.

One of the movement’s targets is KwaZulu-Natal’s Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Act of 2007. It allows for a person resisting eviction to be imprisoned for up to 10 years .

In November last year, Abahlali baseMjondolo challenged the act in the Durban High Court. After Judge President Vuka Tshabalala rejected their attempt to have the slums act declared unconstitutional, they took the case to the Constitutional Court.

At the Constitutional Court hearing in May , Adv Wim Trengove, acting for Abahlali baseMjondolo, argued that the slums act seemed to be in conflict with the 1997 National Housing Act, national housing policy and provisions of the 1998 Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act.

This landmark piece of legislation, known as the PIE Act, gives effect to Section 26 (3) of the constitution which states: “No one may be evicted from their home or have their home demolished without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.”

The circumstances the act considers are how occupiers came onto the land; how long they have lived there; the needs of its elderly, disabled, children and female- headed households; and the availability of suitable alternative accommodation.

The Constitutional Court judges in the recently reversed Joe Slovo judgment made three humane provisions in line with these circumstances . The state should provide 70% of the low-cost housing to be built in the N2 Gateway Project to former or current Joe Slovo residents who applied and qualified for housing. The residents were to be allowed to take part in a phased process of removal ; and the court ruled that they be relocated to sturdy temporary residential units serviced with tarred roads and communal ablution facilities at Delft or another suitable location.

As the housing minister’s application suggests, these provisions appear less than humane when viewed against the history of the N2 Gateway Project.

Phase 1 of the project was completed in mid-2006, with 705 rental flats. Very few of the 1000 families who were moved from Joe Slovo to Delft to make way for this were accommodated .

Phase 2, the building of bonded houses in the Joe Slovo area and Delft, is out of the financial reach of most of the shack dwellers .

Thubelisha Homes, the now defunct section 21 company appointed in 2006 to implement and manage the N2 Gateway Project, has moved people out of the slum-like conditions at the temporary camp into permanent houses at Delft at a rate of 10 families a year.

In March this year, Abahlali baseMjondolo won a victory in the Durban High Court, which granted eight orders that provided for judicial oversight of the Richmond Farm transit camp to which residents of Siyanda in Durban were being relocated.

They had been promised houses in the Khalula development, but when this fell through as a result of corruption, Bheki Cele, the transport MEC at the time, sought their forced removal to the Richmond Farm transit camp.

Residents were offered no guarantees about conditions in the camp, the duration of their stay and where, if anywhere, they would be sent next.

They approached the Durban High Court for protection.

The court ordered that the families moved to the transit camp be given permanent, decent housing within a year.

It asked for a report on the corrupt allocation of houses in Siyanda and, where necessary, that restitution be made to the victims of the corruption.

Then in August, the South Gauteng High Court ruled there could be no evictions at the South Protea settlement in Johannesburg until the possibilities of upgrading the site and relocation to a nearby site had been investigated. It gave the City of Joburg a month to report on the provision of water, sanitation, refuse removal and lighting at Protea South and ordered that “meaningful engagement” be undertaken with the Landless Peoples Movement .

Residents of Protea South had since 2003 been resisting eviction to Doornkop, which they describe as a “human dumping ground” distant from their places of work and their children’s schools .

Despite the importance of residential location to the livelihoods and family structures of slum dwellers, the Joe Slovo ruling stated : “The right (to housing) is a right to adequate housing and not the right to remain in the locality of their choice, namely Joe Slovo.”

In the landmark 2007 Olivia Road case in which more than 400 occupiers of two buildings in the Johannesburg central business district appealed against eviction, the Constitutional Court stated that engagement is a two-way process in which the city and those facing eviction should talk to each other meaningfully.

The Constitutional Court judges in the Joe Slovo case also ordered that residents be allowed full participation in their removal .

However, when eviction is fiercely resisted, and where there has been no evidence of “structured, consistent and careful engagement” in the past, this might seem at worst mischievous and, at best, legal naivety.

The Weekender: No temporary solution

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http://www.businessday.co.za/weekender/article.aspx?ID=BD4A959091

Posted to the web on: 14 March 2009
No temporary solution

Life is uncertain for the residents of Blikkiesdorp, and they fear its thin tin walls may be permanent, writes JEANNE HROMNIK

BLIKKIESDORP won’t be found on any South African map. Its official name is Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area and it is not supposed to exist for more than a short time.

The residents prefer their nickname Blikkiesdorp — Tin Town — as it accurately describes the 1000 or more structures that the city of Cape Town erected in Delft last year to house them.

The temporary relocation area is a stone’s throw from the shacks of the Symphony Way pavement dwellers . The 100-odd families have been living illegally along a blocked-off section of Symphony Way since February last year.

On March 2, the city notified the pavement dwellers of its intention to seek an eviction order in the high court to remove them. But last week, the Durban High Court granted judicial oversight of a transit camp in KwaZulu-Natal, and now the Cape Town residents intend to use this precedent to defend their eviction.

Provincial governments across the country have been using these settlements — known as temporary relocation areas in Cape Town, transit camps in Durban and government shacks in Gauteng — to “temporarily” house residents from squatter camps and inner-city slums until formal housing is provided for them.

“Transit camps often look like concentration camps with razor-wire fencing, spotlights, single entrances and 24-hour police guards,” says shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which won the Durban High Court victory . “Residents are often highly controlled in these places, as if they are in prisons.

“In most cases, these camps are far from the cities where people live, work and school. People are taken there against their will with no guarantees about the conditions there, how long they will be kept there and where, if anywhere, they will be taken next.”

Unlike Tsunami, a neighbouring temporary relocation area , Blikkiesdorp does not look like a slum. The tin walls and roofs of the dwellings gleam in the afternoon sun. There is little space between the structures which are arranged in blocks, with one toilet shared by four households . The toilets appear to be functioning and do not emit the foul smell coming from those in Tsunami. There are taps with running water, but no ablution facilities.

Ashraf Cassiem, chairman of the Anti-Eviction Campaign in the Western Cape, says “the toilets (at Blikkiesdorp) are concrete, the pipelines are concrete” — an unexpected feature in a “temporary” camp .

At the entrance to Blikkiesdorp, three police vehicles and an armoured truck, manned by the Land Invasion Unit, are permanently stationed to maintain order and monitor the area .

Cassiem says there are no temporary relocation areas. The city, he claims, was given R20m to build Blikkiesdorp. It built 1200 structures for people evicted from the adjacent N2 Gateway houses in February last year and is planning to build 1200 more units.

Instead of a temporary stop and a prelude to permanent housing, it is being used to house everyone: people evicted by the council and other homeless families. The city has a 22-year lease on the land on which Blikkiesdorp is erected.

Blikkiesdorp, says Cassiem, is part of a strategy to move unwanted people — “like cattle … as if you are doing them a favour” — to the fringes of cities and outlying areas where they are less visible.

Temporary relocation areas in the Western Cape — such as Happy Valley, built more than 12 years ago outside Stellenbosch and now a vast informal settlement — are permanent relocation areas.

The metal sheets used to construct the walls and roofs of Blikkiesdorp are flimsy and poorly assembled. They can easily be penetrated and several residents have been robbed. Their locks have been cut and new occupiers installed . One resident, it is claimed, is living outside his former home — with his ID and other documents locked inside by the new occupiers.

Residents allege corrupt police officers hand out occupation rights for R600.

Life goes on at Tsunami. A sign above a defunct and odiferous ablution block reads: “Drink Beer Save Water.” Underneath, someone has written: “ibeer idrink ikhona apha”.

At Portia’s Hair Salon across the way, prices are low: R15 for a wash, R30 for a blow-dry and R50 for “Precise Dark and Lovely”. There are numerous spaza shops in the area. Blikkiesdorp already has six shops.

Xolani Bokolo has been living at Tsunami since 2005.

The authorities refused to allow him to rebuild his shack in Joe Slovo informal settlement after a fire there in 2005 left 12000 people homeless.

He says several Tsunami residents have been moved into the adjacent N2 Gateway houses, but when he followed up on his application for a house, he was told he was “not on the system yet”.

“The last forms that we filled in (applications for housing), they found them in the dustbin,” Bokolo says. He refuses to fill in another application , saying he cannot see a reason for doing so.

Bokolo has painted the interior walls of his tin shack a dull shade of powder pink, and has constructed a dividing wall to create a living room and a bedroom .

He says dust seeps through the walls, and despite stuffing paper into the cracks, he sometimes has difficulty sleeping at night because the dust is so thick.

The Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits condemns the government’s policy of using transit camps as accommodation for forcibly removed shack dwellers.

“Relocation to transit camps is most often done to make way for infrastructure and development projects which will not benefit those being removed,” it says .

Last Friday, the Durban High Court ruled in favour of residents who had lived in the Siyanda informal settlement who had been moved to a transit camp in nearby Richmond Farm. The residents had been promised houses in a nearby development. However, angry at the conditions in the camp, they sought the protection of the high court. It ruled that they must be given permanent housing within a year.

The court also ruled that there should be an immediate investigation into the corrupt allocation of houses in Siyanda and, where necessary, restitution made to the victims of corruption. It ordered that a report be made to the court every three months on conditions in the camp and that Siyanda residents can return to the court after two weeks if conditions in the camp are not adequate

A decision is pending in the evictions case of 20000 Joe Slovo residents, who refuse to move to the Delft temporary relocation area. Their case was heard in the Constitutional Court in August last year.

The Weekender: Still Waiting for Shelter (Symphony Way)

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“Perfect rhythm”….for crying in the proverbial bucket….And as for the headline….Please see the comment on this article at the AEC site here.

http://www.businessday.co.za/weekender/article.aspx?ID=BD4A899796

Still waiting for shelter
Homeless people who have not been accommodated in Cape Town’s N2 Gateway housing project party while their children fear eviction, writes JEANNE HROMNIK

AT SYMPHONY Way in Delft, squatters have built shacks on either side of the road alongside the N2 Gateway Project houses they occupied illegally and were evicted from in February last year. Now they are fighting the prospect of eviction from their shacks.

They say if that happens they will set up camp elsewhere and wait for another eviction.

They have already survived the torrential rain of the past winter.

They have vowed never to move to the temporary relocation areas that the government built outside Delft, about 40km from Cape Town. The temporary relocation areas are grim and hazardous places and already accommodate thousands of people with little hope of moving out.

Symphony Way — the newly constructed extension between the N2 highway and the Stellenbosch arterial route — had its grand opening last year, a few months before the pavement dwellers were brutally evicted and left without shelter. Their unwelcome presence on the road forced the city to block off the section of Symphony Way between Silversands and Hindle Road.

Recently 12 of us — an odd group of friends, united by a common interest in getting to know each other — came to Symphony Way for a party.

It’s the South African way of dealing with problems. Toyi- toyiing and singing.

We brought with us two drums. The supply of drummers seemed endless. From almost the moment of our arrival the drums went into action. They continued into the evening, through the red sunset and into the dark night, lit by the fire we built with dead wood from the nearby strandveld.

We also brought 5kg of meat, 10kg of potatoes, 10kg of onions, five large loaves of home-baked Italian bread, four rolls of heavy-duty tin foil, ginger, peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, two packets of coffee, red and green peppers, mushrooms, styrofoam cups and 2l of milk.

We forgot the salt.

The tea was brewed in Aunty Jane’s shack, which serves as a communal kitchen, an office, her bedroom and living space.

The shack is spacious and well constructed, with wooden beams across the ceiling, and plywood and fabric walls.

The fragrance of the tea floated into the open doorways of the pavement dwellers, through the windows of the Gateway houses, past the piles of tyres and the concrete barricades, down Symphony Way.

Aunty Jane is a member of the Symphony Way pavement dwellers committee, which makes communal decisions with the full participation of the newly emergent pavement community.

There are 139 families living on either side of the road adjacent to the Gateway houses, from which they are now separated by razor wire. There are concrete barriers at opposite ends of this stretch of road.

The Symphony squatters are former backyard dwellers from Delft. They say they moved into the New Gateway houses at the instigation of a well-meaning Democratic Alliance city councillor to prevent the houses being given to shack dwellers from the Joe Slovo informal settlement in Langa, 4500 of whom had already been accommodated in Tsunami and Thubelisha, the temporary relocation areas at Delft.

The Joe Slovo people are being removed from their 25000-strong informal settlement at Langa to make way for the N2 Gateway Project. They didn’t want to move to Delft. They prefer to be nearer to employment opportunities in the city and to remain in their longstanding communities.

They barricaded the N2 highway in September last year in protest, and took their case against eviction all the way to the Constitutional Court (accompanied on the train journey to Johannesburg by 30 Symphony Way residents). They had even devised a plan for higher-density housing that could help to keep them in Langa.

They received little response from the authorities. The government, it seems, is not as keen on participatory democracy as the shack dwellers it aims to assist. And it has its sights firmly fixed on presenting a good view of the city to the many visitors who will be driving on the N2 from Cape Town International Airport in 2010.

Florrie Langenhoven was the only visibly drunk person on the night of the party. She captured young men and placed her hips seductively against theirs while moving to the sound of the drums with perfect rhythm.

She led me to her shack , where she took out a photo album from a drawer under her bed and told me the story of her life.

Her shack was spotless, with cheerful red checked curtains keeping her kitchen utensils out of sight. Her bed is positioned over a set of drawers in which she keeps her cigarettes, her divorce decree, her clothing and other possessions. Despite the lock on the door, someone had come in and stolen her cigarettes.

Langenhoven told me about her five children, the youngest still at school and living with her sister in Mitchells Plain.

She told me about her grandchild, a tik baby born with her intestines hanging loose within her distended abdominal cavity. She’s okay now.

They seemed like a happy family, although separated by life and circumstance. Langenhoven had come to Symphony Way drawn by the lure of a house.

She interrupted her story to pee gracefully and efficiently into a plastic basin. She said she avoided the mobile toilets provided for fear of infection .

Back at the party, the meat, potatoes and onions had been put in packets made of foil and placed among the red-hot coals in the fireplace. A pile of sausages was grilling on an aged black braai grid. It was still light enough to read the texts the squatter’s children had written to accompany photographs they had taken of themselves and the other Symphony pavement dwellers.

The photographs and stories were pinned to the razor-wire fencing that separates the Gateway housing and the Symphony dwellers.

“Dear who it may concern. How I feel toward Symphony Way. The first time I come to Symphony it was nice. But there were ups and downs, happiness and sad time. I do remember the day. Months went past and we as symphony have to be patents cause if we not there is no hope for us to get houses. From Wagheeda.”

“My first day in Symphony was like going to Hell…. And the reporters came every morning to see where we sleep. And we were in the ‘spotlight’. People felt heartbroken for us and gave us donations. We were the headlines of all the newspapers … the only thing that was good was meeting new people and making new friends. Felicia Wentzel/Fatiema.”

“My first day on symphony was so sad. I cried and (was) very very scared of the dark and we did not know where we are going to get food to eat.”

Several stories were written about the day of the eviction, February 19, “The day Uncle Ashraf had tears in his eyes”.

A child was shot three times with rubber bullets that day and 20 people were so seriously injured they had to be admitted to hospital.

Ashraf Cassiem, the chairman of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, was not at our party but he had been there when it counted.

The children’s stories often ended with a brief statement of the number of years their families had been on the waiting lists for houses: seven, 16, 19, 20 years.

There are other texts to be read on Symphony Way.

“No land, no house, no vote”. That is what the red T-shirts say. They are worn by committee members, several of whom sit down to eat at the table in Aunty Jane’s shack.

There is not enough food for all who gather around. The loaves and sausage have to be divided into very small pieces, but the children queue patiently.

As darkness descends I sit on the kerb by the fire, sheltered by the bodies of children standing around me and larger bodies next to them.

There is comfort in the proximity of these bodies and a kind of determination in those who continue to gyrate to the rhythm of the drums.

“The children’s stories often ended with a brief statement of the number of years their families had been on the waiting lists for houses: seven, 16, 19, 20 years ”