http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5509955

No kick-off for blackout victims of QQ-section

June 11, 2010 Edition 1

Quinton Mtyala

NO electricity for 700 families in QQ-section, Khayelitsha, means that, when the World Cup kicks off in Cape Town tonight, many of them won’t be able to watch.

The City of Cape Town’s failure to move them to one of several sites identified for flood relief victims had caused some residents to protest by blocking off a stretch of Lansdowne Road that passes by QQ-section.

Every winter, informal settlements like QQ section are flooded because they are either located below the water table or close to retention ponds.

Because of this, no utility services can be installed, and this has often been met with violent protest, as happened last year when the people of BT-section closed off a section of Lansdowne Road for more than a month in September.

Last week the city acknowledged that it had been forced to delay plans to move most of the 1 656 families living below the water table in Khayelitsha owing to objections by residents in the township’s relatively well-off Elitha Park.

At a meeting in Site B earlier this week, Premier Helen Zille said that if an agreement could not be reached with those objecting to the flood relief areas by the end of this month, R96 million allocated to the project would have to be returned to the provincial Treasury.

Mbongeni Mkhaliphi, a community activist and protest organiser in the area, said people there had on three occasions been promised that they would be moved to other areas, but nothing had come of it.

Three hundred families were supposed to have been moved this winter.

“They promised us land in Mfuleni, but nothing has come of it. Between June and September we were supposed to move… now they say it will only happen next year,” said Mkhaliphi.

quinton.mtyala@inl.co.za