Category Archives: Lindiwe Sisulu

The Nomzamo Eviction: A Potential Turning Point?

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/2041

The Nomzamo Eviction: A Potential Turning Point?

Richard Pithouse

The destruction of the Nomzamo settlement in Lwandle, Cape Town, has received an extraordinary degree of political and media attention, much of it noting the illegality and brutality of the eviction, and much of it sympathetic to the occupiers.

Evictions, generally illegal and frequently violent, have been an everyday part of actually existing modes of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the major cities have units maintained for the sole purpose of mobilising state violence, usually unlawfully, to combat land occupations. But despite the routine violence and illegality of these actions, as well as their striking resonance with images from the past, they have, in practice, been broadly accepted as necessary and legitimate actions by both the ANC and the DA, as well as much of the media and civil society.

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Business Day: Eviction delays sought while laws are tightened

http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/2014/06/17/eviction-delays-sought-while-laws-are-tightened

Eviction delays sought while laws are tightened

CAPE TOWN — Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu wants to tighten the law on evictions and has asked private and state landowners to hold off on any "until there is a clear understanding of the laws and basic human rights requirements that must be met".

She is also seeking an engagement with the Constitutional Court and the judiciary on how the law governing evictions is applied.

However, her appeal for a suspension of evictions does not have legal force.

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Cape Argus: This place is a dump – N2 residents

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http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/this-place-is-a-dump-n2-residents-1.1022714

This place is a dump – N2 residents

By Clayton Barnes

Residents of the N2 Gateway housing scheme in Langa say they have been forgotten.

The once-secure government housing complex next to the N2 is now a dump, says Mbuyi Nogahtshi, who moved to the area in 2005, just after it was opened by former housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu.

“I clearly remember the day I moved in here. I was so happy. My life had changed and I thought the government was finally delivering on its promises. But I didn’t expect just to be left here without any services. The first few months were okay, but now this place is a dump. Our kids are not safe and the houses are falling apart,” Nogahtshi said.

Started in March 2005, the N2 Gateway was the pilot scheme for a new Comprehensive Housing Plan (CHP) launched by former president Thabo Mbeki.

The CHP was envisaged as a joint venture by the national, provincial and local governments to prioritise housing.

The N2 Gateway planned to deliver 22 000 homes within six months. This was later downgraded in 2007 to just over 16 000.

To date, only 7 462 houses have been completed and handed to beneficiaries. A further 1 194 are at various stages of construction in Joe Slovo and Delft.

An auditor-general’s report compiled in 2008 and tabled in Parliament in April 2009 revealed that the project had “not been managed economically, efficiently or effectively”.

A memorandum of understanding was signed by the three tiers of government in 2005 to define roles and responsibilities.

However, the A-G found that the necessary legislation and policies were not in place when construction began. The memorandum was also found not to clearly define different roles, which led to uncertainties about accountability when things went wrong.

In March 2009, state-owned housing company Thubelisha, which had implemented the project, closed down and the Housing Development Agency took over.

During a visit to the N2 Gateway in Langa on Friday, residents complained about cracked walls, leaking roofs and ceilings that “gave in” a year after they moved in.

Thousands of residents of the Joe Slovo informal settlement, across the road from the Gateway precinct, say they will accept anything, and have even considered moving into duplexes owned by FNB which have been empty for three years.

The 43 two- and three-bedroomed duplexes, only metres from the N2 Gateway scheme, were built in 2007. They had all been sold, according to Housing MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela, but home owners could not move in until the city reconstructed road servitudes.

Sophia Mhlangu, a pensioner who moved into the in 2006, said there were a number of building defects which she reported to the developers after moving in.

“It’s even worse now,” she said. “It’s a lovely place, but we feel forgotten. All we want is for them to fix the defects and have the roads fixed. There are potholes everywhere.”

Steven Lennox, who lives in a one-bedroomed apartment with his wife, pays R700 a month. He said he had complained to the Housing Department about the defects, but was still waiting for answers.

“It’s as if they don’t care,” said Lennox.

Madikizela said: “We are aware of the defects and are busy fixing them. That land belongs to the city, which has a land availability agreement with a contractor. That contract expires at the end of the month.

“The city will then have to decide on one of two options: either they ask us (the provincial government) to assist with funding and to appoint a service provider, or they transfer the land to us.”

Madikizela said the province and the city were waiting for the present land availability agreement to lapse before they took action.

“Next month, we will know for sure what our next step will be.” – Cape Argus

clayton.barnes@inl.co.za

Sisulu patronises SA’s legitimately angry youth

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http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=108122

Sisulu patronises SA’s legitimately angry youth

by Jacob Dlamini

THEY just don’t get it, do they? Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told Parliament on Tuesday that she wanted to reintroduce conscription. According to a report by Business Day Online, Sisulu said this “will not be a compulsory national service, but an unavoidable national service”. She was quick to say the government did not want to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Sisulu reportedly told Parliament that she wanted the defence force to provide a rite of passage for young people “leaving school with no skills and no prospect of being absorbed into a labour market that is already glutted”. She said: “Every culture known to men has a process of coming of age. This includes some initiation into responsible adulthood, where the line is drawn from childish ways to purposeful, responsible adult behaviour. We can do that for this country, because that is the one thing we need, to build a future for our development and prosperity. A place where the young unemployed can find skills, dignity and purpose.”

Sisulu presides over the most pampered, but also the most inefficient military in Africa, what on earth makes her think the aged, generally obese, unprofessional and ill- disciplined South African National Defence Force is equipped to teach young people about “responsible adult behaviour”?

Does she seriously expect the public to believe that entrusting young people to the bloated men and women who run the defence force will do the trick and help these young people draw the line between childishness and responsible adulthood? Aren’t these the same men and women who cannot command, let alone discipline, the soldiers at their command? Did we not have recently the spectacle of soldiers, some drunk and in uniform, going on the rampage outside the Union Buildings to demand better pay?

Yet Sisulu seems to think that it is in the company of these soldiers that young men and women will learn about discipline and the value of hard work.

But it is not only the military about which Sisulu has no clue. She told Parliament: “Any television footage of service delivery protests will show you that at the forefront of this, in great majority, are our youth, with excessive anger and misdirected energy and frustration etched on their faces. We as a country can ill afford this. Our youth are an asset and we must direct them properly.”

No, what SA can ill-afford are the arrogance and ignorance that assume that young people take part in “service delivery protests” because of excessive anger, misdirected energy and frustration.

The protests we have seen in recent years are not youthful and childish frolics that would disappear with a stint in the military.

I have studied protests in four different towns in two provinces and have learnt enough to know not to patronise those who take part in them.

In a corner of Piet Retief, the lives of young people are centred on the fetching of water. They have to wake up in the early hours of the morning to queue outside a communal spigot that is erratic at best. They must fetch water before walking long distances to one of the two high schools in the township.

The schools are overcrowded, teachers indifferent and education dodgy. The kids are not stupid. They know that life does not have to be this way.

In Standerton, young people see council officials driving “yachts” — cars so expensive everyone is forever asking how people working for one of the poorest municipalities in a depressed part of the country can afford such possessions. It is the same in Hazy View and Katlehong, where corruption has become a part of daily life. In these places, young people have little or no hope of ever getting state jobs unless they “know” someone important or are willing to pay for one.

Even the august defence force that Sisulu expects to turn young people into responsible adult citizens is not immune from the corruption that has become endemic. Speak to young people in these and other towns and they will tell you that you have no chance of getting a job in the military unless you are prepared to buy that job. That is the depressing reality that confronts young people throughout SA. They protest because they do not believe the new SA is serving them. They protest because they see that as the only way to make their grievances known. Not because they are childish and have pent- up energies that need an outlet.

Sisulu, who has not exactly covered herself in competence — never mind glory — in her long career as a minister, should know this basic truth. But she doesn’t. How could she be expected to know it when she, like the African National Congress, refuses to take seriously the meanings of the protests that have erupted all over the country?

Young people, old people, South Africans are protesting because the new SA has failed to deliver on its promises to them.

They are protesting because they do not like the arrogance of those in power. They do not like the haughtiness of those, like Sisulu, who seem to think that accounting to a democratically elected Parliament is doing the legislature a favour.

Truth be told, it is Sisulu who could do with some discipline. What young people need are schools that work, safe neighbourhoods, meaningful jobs and a belief in the future — something Sisulu and her comrades have failed to deliver in 16 years of trying.

Exchange of letters between Martin Legassick and Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu

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Exchange of letters between Martin Legassick and Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu

On 12 September the Cape Times published the following letter from Martin Legassick under the heading “Meet residents, Sisulu”.

Instead of issuing a meaningless “ultimatum” to the residents of Joe Slovo informal settlement, (“N2 Protest ultimatum”, September 11) Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu should live up to her responsibilities and meet the community face to face.

I was invited by the task team at Joe Slovo informal settlement to observe their protest action shutting down the N2 early on Monday morning. What I saw in the dark was a peaceful protest interrupted by a police riot. Contrary to some news reports no guns were fired at the police. Nor were stones thrown, until the police had wounded some 12 people with rubber bullets. Riotous police behaviour was witnessed by reporters again later in the morning, as you report, when police opened fire on a crowd including old people, children and women with a mere 20 second warning, and wounded many more.

Joe Slovo residents marched to parliament on August 3 asking to see her because they do not want to be forcibly removed to Delft and have a plan for how N2 Gateway should be altered to take them into account. The present residents of N2 Gateway phase 1 also marched to parliament on July 17 asking to see Minister Sisulu, because they are fed up with the unaffordable rents and the building defects in the flats. Both submitted memoranda. N2 Gateway has become a fiasco.

Minister Sisulu did not meet either of these communities, and issued replies only through the media, disdainful of their complaints. As a result, she now has the blood of women and children on her hands. By refusing to meet them, she is acting like a coward. In addition she and her messenger MEC Richard Dyantyi (who has said that removal to Delft is “necessary”) are behaving like old apartheid ministers trying to engage in forced removals. If N2 Gateway is Sisulu’s pet “flagship” project she must meet with protesting communities face to face rather than delegating the responsibility to others. They will not give up their demands, whatever it costs.

Martin Legassick
(Emeritus Professor, UWC)

Martin Legassick received the following reply from Lindiwe Sisulu, addressed to me at the University of the Western Cape, dated 12/9/2007:

I have read your letter (Meet residents, Sisulu) that appeared in the Cape Times of 12 September 2007 and reject the contents with absolute contempt.

In fact, if you were present at the N2 Gateway and did nothing to stop what was clearly an explosive situation, who has blood on their hands?

It is such a sad day to see you come down so low in my estimate.

Yours sincerely,

L. N. Sisulu, M.P.

Minister of Housing

Martin Legassick replied to her as follows (6/10/2007):

Dear Minister Sisulu,

Because I am retired I do not go into the University of the Western Cape very often and hence received your letter of 12 September replying to my letter in the Cape Times of the same date only yesterday. You were clearly very angry when you wrote it, saying that you “reject the contents with absolute contempt”. I hope that by now you are reflecting more wisely on the situation of N2 Gateway and the Joe Slovo informal settlement.

The NGO Development Action Group, which has worked with government on housing, wrote as long ago as its 2004-5 annual report that “The top-down approach in the N2 project undermines its overall sustainability… The casual, continued and increasing practice of excluding people from decision-making about development processes that directly affect their lives is an obstacle that communities are unlikely to tolerate for much longer.”

It is this exclusion of people from decision-making about their own futures which has led to the present situation. There have seen several publicity pictures of yourself in the newspapers, posing in a hard hat at various stages of N2 Gateway. But when have you ever sat down and met with the residents of Joe Slovo informal settlement, over whose homes N2 Gateway phases 1 and 2 have been and are planned to be built? Never. Not once! Yet now you intend to try to forcibly remove them. It is outrageous, a travesty of democracy. You should withdraw your court action and engage yourself in meaningful negotiations with Joe Slovo residents, listening to what they have to say. The Western Cape provincial structures of COSATU and the SACP have also called on you to do this.

You have relied on Thubelisha and on MEC Richard Dyantyi to conduct negotiations on your behalf. When you first declared this project, it was as your own national pilot project, your flagship. Yet, when there are difficulties, you are not there to deal with them. This is why in my letter I called you a coward. And, unless you are prepared to meet with the residents of Joe Slovo I will continue to regard you as a coward.

Prince Xhanti Sigcawu, general manager of Thubelisha, stated in a letter to the Cape Times on September 20th that there were only 1500 families remaining in the Joe Slovo informal settlement who had not moved to Delft. Yet in the papers you, Dyantyi and Thubelisha submitted on the same day to the Cape High Court calling for the forced removal of the residents of Joe Slovo, there was a list of 4500 households, and a request to remove an average 100 families a week for 45 weeks, again an estimate of 4500 households. Prince Xhanti misled the public in his letter. Yet you have said that you have “the fullest confidence” in Thubelisha’s “consultations”. How can you have such confidence in people who lie to the public?

Joe Slovo residents have concluded that it is a waste of time discussing with Thubelisha or Dyantyi. They want to talk to you. On 3 August they marched to parliament to present a memorandum with a request to meet you. It was received by your personal assistant, who promised a reply within a week. In fact your only reply was a disdainful one reported in an article in the back pages of the Weekend Argus (25/8/2007). You did not even have the courtesy to deliver your reply to the residents of Joe Slovo.

Let us deal first with the hypocrisy of your reply. You claimed that Joe Slovo residents were “unwilling to accept that communities of the future would cut across race and class.” This is because they oppose the building of bond (or “gap” housing) on the land from which you want to evict them. But if you want to integrate communities across race and class, why do you not, as COSATU Western Cape regional secretary Tony Ehrenreich has suggested, move them to state land in Constantia rather than to the margins of the city in Delft?

You also claimed you wanted to “eradicate slums”. But what you are doing is building housing on the land occupied by Joe Slovo residents which they cannot afford – bond or gap housing. The cynical would claim that you merely want to prettify the edges of the N2 before the football World Cup in 2010. In fact you are not eliminating slums but merely moving the Joe Slovo ‘slum’ to Delft. I have seen the TRA housing in Delft and it looks like a concentration camp, with only public communal toilets, few taps, and not much electricity. Most of the Joe Slovo residents who have been previously moved to Delft are very unhappy and want to return to Joe Slovo. Many of them moved only because after the January 2005 fire anything looked better than the tent accommodation they were in.

You refused to meet with the Joe Slovo residents, instead trying to debate with them through the media. Perhaps you do not understand their frustration. They took an action of peaceful civil disobedience, closing down the N2. The police opened fire “explosively” with rubber bullets, and wounded a number of people. You ask me what I could have done to prevent this situation. Why try to shift the blame onto me? All I can say is that this situation would not have occurred if you had met with Joe Slovo residents. This is why I repeat that the blood is on your hands.

In fact, your actions, as the SACP and COSATU also state, are no different from those of the apartheid government. They evicted Africans from Cape Town in the 1960s and 1970s on the grounds of race, until the residents of Crossroads successfully defied them in the late 1970s. You are moving the poor from near the centre of Cape Town, where they have access to job opportunities, schools, etc to the margins of the city (Delft) on the grounds of class. You are forcibly evicting the poor in the interests of the better-off. Shame on you, Minister Sisulu!

After the Joe Slovo residents occupied the N2 you lost your sense of proportion. For example you threatened that all residents of Joe Slovo would be removed from the housing waiting lists. Let us leave aside that Tony Ehrenreich regards the housing waiting lists as “a joke”. How could you unconstitutionally deny the right of housing to any South African citizen? “She has declared we are not South African” said Joe Slovo task team member Sifiso Mapasa to me, echoing the words of Sol Plaatje about the segregationist 1913 Natives Land Act, that it turned Africans into “foreigners in the land of their birth.” Moreover, the allocation of housing is, by law, a provincial and not a national responsibility. Finally, this meaningless “ultimatum” of yours would have constituted action against individuals without giving them a hearing, also unconstitutional.

The international media are very interested in the story of the Joe Slovo informal settlement. Your arrogant behaviour towards its residents will bring world-wide discredit on our government, as has the president’s silence on Zimbabwe and the health minister’s ‘denialism’ on AIDS.

What however most disturbs me about your letter is that you have replied to me at all, when you still have not replied to the residents of Joe Slovo. Your letter is rude to me, but I take no offence at that. What disturbs me is that if you have “absolute contempt” for what I say, then you must have the same for the residents of Joe Slovo. Most of them would have voted for the ANC in the last elections – and this is how you treat them, ignoring them, refusing to meet them, insulting them. From recent statements you have made in parliament it would seem to me you have become mesmerised by the banks, and forgotten that you are a servant of the people. If you wish to continue this correspondence, do so not with me, but with the elected Joe Slovo residents task team, whose contact details you have.

I returned last Thursday from the Cape High Court. The previous week, as you must be aware, thousands of Joe Slovo residents presented papers contesting your interim forced removal court order, making a mockery of your and Thubelisha’s claims that Joe Slovo residents are being “intimidated” into opposing removal to Delft. On Thursday I joined those same thousands outside the court in singing “Asiyi e Delft”.

Let me conclude by saying that I am willing to meet you any time, with the residents of Joe Slovo, to sit down and discuss these issues on a face to face basis.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Legassick
Emeritus Professor