Category Archives: The Times

The Times: Two killed in Cape Town shack fires

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article1055304.ece/Two-killed-in-Cape-Town-shack-fires

Two killed in Cape Town shack fires
May 7, 2011 11:34 AM | By Sapa

Two people were killed in separate shack fires in Cape Town on Saturday morning, says the city’s Disaster Risk Management Centre.

Spokesman Wilfred Solomons-Johannes said one man died and 115 people left displaced after a fire swept through an informal settlement in Khayelitsha.

“The fire started at 2am. Thirty shacks were burnt,” said Solomons-Johannes.

In another incident at 5am, a man was killed when his shack caught alight in Tambo Village near Manenberg.

The man lived alone and the cause of the fire was not yet known.

“The wood and iron structure in which he lived caught fire and he suffered serious burns,” Solomons-Johannes said.

Police and fire authorities are investigating.

The Times: Shack dwellers ‘mourn’ freedom

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article1040385.ece/Shack-dwellers-mourn-freedom

Shack dwellers ‘mourn’ freedom

Apr 27, 2011 9:55 PM | By PHILANI NOMBEMBE

Hundreds of protesting Cape Town shack dwellers yesterday threatened to boycott next month’ s local government elections.

Thandiswa Gabula, of QQ section, an informal settlement in Khayelitsha, on the Cape Flats, was one of the people protesting against lack of services, including basic sanitation, while participating in a shack-fire meeting organised by the Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers’) movement.

Gabula, 45, a mother of four, said she felt excluded from South Africa and that Freedom Day meant nothing to her because her community did not have toilets, running water or electricity.

“I have been voting since 1994. My life hasn’t changed. I will not vote this time around,” she said.

“I know South Africans who have got the means are celebrating this day elsewhere, but this day brings me a lot of sadness.”

For the 23 years that Gabula has lived in the township, she has had to ask her neighbours for permission to use their toilet.

“I think I will only vote during the national government elections,” she said.

Resident Lulama Njadu, 42, echoed Gabula’s sentiments.

He said his family’s circumstances pained him and that he had to send his four young children to Eastern Cape to live with a relative because living conditions in his community were unhealthy.

“I don’t see the reason why I should vote. Leaders have been using us as a ladder to get cushy jobs. Once elected, they take us for fools … this day means nothing to me but suffering.”

Mzonke Poni, spokesman for Abahlali baseMjondolo, said the gathering was not to celebrate Freedom Day but to “mourn it”.

“We live in shacks, in other people’s back yards, in rotting council homes and other urban and rural ghettos. But it’s not only about where we live or what services we receive,” said Poni.

“Because we are poor, the government treats us as though we are less than human. This is why we are forced to hold Unfreedom Day – to assert our right to dignity.”

Earlier, the Social Justice Coalition and hundreds of Khayelitsha residents delivered a memorandum to Cape Town mayor Dan Plato to demand access to “clean and safe sanitation services”.

The Times: No freedom yet in stinking Zandspruit

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article1040386.ece/No-freedom-yet-in-stinking-Zandspruit

No freedom yet in stinking Zandspruit
Apr 27, 2011 9:58 PM | By AMUKELANI CHAUKE and CALEB MELBY

Thania Moyo has to walk for five minutes through densely packed shacks to use a neighbourhood toilet in the yard of a family friend.

Though the 16-year-old was born in a democratic South Africa, she says she is not sure what freedom means.

Moyo has spent her life of “freedom” sharing a tiny shack with her parents and sister Samantha, 15, in the Zandspruit informal settlement, northwest of Johannesburg.

“Life is tough for us. If I want to use the toilet at night, I must leave our shack and walk to my neighbour on the other side,” she said yesterday.

“It is not always safe because it is sometimes dark when the street lights are not working.”

For the past few weeks, residents have burned tyres and blockaded roads in protest against the lack of toilets and sewerage, drains, roads, refuse collection and electricity.

The area was calm yesterday. There was a heavy police presence and a police helicopter flew over the shacks.

“I cannot explain what Freedom Day means, but I don’t think this is it,” Moyo said.

“The government should build houses with toilets in the area because there is no privacy here.”

Across the settlement, David Majozi celebrated Freedom Day sick and unemployed.

The clinic in Zandspruit was closed for the holiday.

“The clinic is one of the hardest problems we face,” said Majozi, who has lived in the settlement for 27 years. “It is understaffed. It is too small.

“When it is open, the queue stretches forever. Even if you are very sick, they tell you ‘Go home; come back tomorrow’.”

Both of Majozi’s eyes are infected, and a bulbous tumour protrudes below his left eye.

He is one of many Zandspruit residents who feel disillusioned about the democracy that was to have made life better.

The sewerage cap at the clinic, like so many pipes throughout Zandspruit, leaks grey water into nearby shacks and onto the road, forming a stream that fills the paths between homes, and flows under the floor of some houses.

Some residents have placed bricks across their floors and paths to allow them to walk without stepping into the muck.

The streams run down to a reservoir that separates the informal settlement from neighbouring middle-class suburbs such as Honeydew and Sonnedal.

Danie Tsabo, who lives in a shack with his wife and four children, says toilets are in such high demand that some of his neighbours have padlocked theirs so that they have sole use of them.

As he spoke, Tsabo stared at a photograph of a house belonging to his former employer, who left South Africa in 2002.

“Even if I don’t get this house, I dream that one day I can move to a decent house with my family,” he said.

Christina Ralane applied for a house in 1996: “We are promised houses and nothing . but empty promises. Nothing gets better. ”

The Times: Liberation – A broken covenant

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article1040395.ece/Liberation–A-broken-covenant

Liberation: A broken covenant

April 27, 2011 9:19 PM | By As told to Sipho Masondo

I don’t see the benefits of freedom, but I hope they will come in my lifetime. I love freedom, but for now it means bloody empty promises. I still have to s*** in such a toilet [a “ventilated improved pit” toilet] and have no privacy in my house.

I’m an old man now and I struggle to walk, but I will take the long walk to Freedom Square with you. My sons, Herbert and Joseph, are now married and have moved out. My oldest son, Herbert, has bought a house in Eldorado Park; Joseph bought one in Zola.

I wish they could buy me a house because clearly this government is failing. I don’t know why they have not bought me a house and I’m scared to ask them. I’m old now and will probably go the way of all flesh soon. My heart’s one desire is to move out of this shack into a house.

I was a youngster, about 16, when I arrived here in Kliptown in 1952 from Sophiatown, where the boere had forcibly removed us, dumping us here and in Meadowlands. All the shacks that you see here were not here. This was a football field when I got here. This is where Kaizer Chiefs boss Kaizer Motaung and Chippa Moloi played.

Those were tough days. We were very scared of white people. As youngsters, we were not allowed to be seen in a group of more than three people. I remember the day before the drafting of the Freedom Charter: we were chased by the police and one of my friends, Gabriel Jacobs, disappeared. And I never saw him again until this day.

On June 26 1955 this whole area was abuzz. I was not at the drafting itself; I was with other young guys looking out for the police.

Thank God, when they came and raided us the charter had already been drafted.

There was a tree right here – it’s where it all happened. No one in their wildest dream would have dreamed that this place would be like this today.

But the Kliptown you see today is different. On the other side of the railway line is a modern Kliptown, where there is progress, with the government having spent about R300-million to give the area a face-lift. There is a four-star Holiday Inn, underground parking, shops, good roads and houses. That side is strictly for tourists.

But where we live is rotten. My heart sinks when I cross the railway line. On our side there are streams of dirty and smelly water running around our shacks; there is no electricity. We use communal taps and toilets. We don’t have houses.

In the early ’60s, a friend and I were arrested by the Kliptown police for loitering. We were detained for three weeks. While inside, we were woken up for a cold shower at 4am every day and it was winter. We were made to run barefoot on very rough concrete. If we complained, we were thumped with batons.

In those days, a black person was nothing, to be honest. I remember at [a company] in Maraisburg where I worked there was a manager … he was a dog, he didn’t like black people. He saw us as labourers and not as human beings.

In June 1976 very few people managed to go to work. The whole township was up in smoke. I remember, right here in Kliptown, we found a boy with nails all over his body. Burned tyres were all that remained around his burnt body.

When [Nelson] Mandela was released in 1990 I was very happy because I had last seen him in Kliptown in 1955. Mandela has helped us a lot. Though I’m not free in other ways, I can feel freedom in my blood. My soul is free, and it’s like I’m in a new world.

We are in a democracy, and had it not been for 1994 I don’t know where we would be.

I will still vote for the ANC anyway; after all, I get an old-age grant from them.

The government has done a lot in other places, but nothing here. They must say if they will give us services, or it they won’t. We want water, electricity, houses like everyone else. They shouldn’t run around; we need to know.

We are probably the last set of shacks in Soweto. You will be surprised that some people here still use the bucket system, which the government promised to get rid of in 2007. If they tell us that they will not do anything for us, better still, we will die in peace knowing that they care less about us.”

Let them drink Valpré says Ficksburg mayor

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/specialreports/elections2011/article1028697.ece/Let-them-drink-Valpr-eacute–says-Ficksburg-mayor

Let them drink Valpré says Ficksburg mayor

Residents’ anger boils over at Tatane court case
Apr 18, 2011 10:24 PM | By SIPHO MASONDO in Ficksburg

“People say there is no water in this town. What is this?” giggled Ficksburg’s mayor, Mbothoma Maduna, reaching into his office fridge for bottles of Valpré mineral water.

Maduna’s words came minutes before six policemen appeared in the Ficksburg Magistrate’s Court, a stone’s throw from his office, in connection with the death of Andries Tatane, killed during a protest against the town’s crippling water shortages.

On Wednesday, Tatane was allegedly shot twice at close range with rubber bullets, and beaten with batons, by a group of police officers in an attack shown nationwide on SABC TV news.

He and residents of the nearby township of Maqheleng had marched to the Setsoto municipal offices to demand a reliable supply of water and an immediate halt to the daily sewage spills into roads and gardens in the township.

A postmortem examination has found that Tatane died from gunshot wounds. The examiner’s report will be completed in a few weeks.

The Times has learned that a number of Independent Complaints Directorate officials were present at the examination by the Bloemfontein district surgeon.

ICD spokesman Moses Dlamini said the investigation into Tatane’s death might be finalised by the end of this week.

Investigators interviewed 14 policemen and arrested six of them.

The trial of Olebogeng Mphirime, Tehedi Moeketsie, Jonas Skosana, and Mphonyane Ntaje, who face charges of serious assault, and of Israel Moiloa and Mothusi Magano, charged with murder, was postponed to April 26, when they are expected to apply for bail.

Dlamini said more arrests might follow.

Tatane’s widow, Rose, and a relative of one of the six accused almost came to blows in court yesterday.

After the female relative entered the packed courtroom and demanded seats for the accused’s family, Rose Tatane shouted: “Shut up! Shut up! Do you not care that we have lost a person? The only thing you care about is sitting space for your people.

“Do you know that we could very well ask the mob [of protestors outside] to attack you when we leave this place?

“I wish I had a gun. I was going to kill them all [the accused] when they come inside!”

A court orderly asked the other woman to leave.

The six policemen came into the court wearing hats, hooded tops and woollen caps drawn over their eyes to prevent them being identified.

They were remanded in custody and will return to court on Tuesday next week for their bail hearing.

As they walked out of the court, Rose Tatane shouted: “These are not police, they are thugs!”

Outside the court, a group of about 500 protesters sang, whistled and waved placards, demanding that immediate action be taken against the alleged killers.

“No bail! No bail! No bail!” they chanted. Some of their placards read: “Protect us, don’t kill us”, “Rot in jail”, “Shoot to kill” and “Cele do your job”.

Others waved placards showing newspaper pictures of the police attacking Tatane, blood flowing from his chest, and collapsing.

“Somebody hold us, we will kill these dogs,” the crowd shouted, charging towards a group of grim-faced policemen inside the court’s yard, safely behind locked gates.

Facing the municipal building, they sang: “We don’t have water, sewage is stinking and it’s rotten. What have we done? Why are the police killing us? Why did they kill Tatane? He was fighting for our rights.”

Tsheliso Mpekoa, a local businessman who organised the march during which Tatane was killed, said the residents will not back down in their calls for Maduna, his senior managers and his councillors to resign.

He said that the municipality was riddled with corruption.

“We are meeting the co-operative governance MEC, Mamiki Qabathe, on Thursday. The municipality should be placed under administration. There should be an investigation and those who have to be dismissed should be dismissed.”

But Maduna insisted his administration was clean.

“It’s a perception and it’s not enough to make conclusions that we are failing to deal with corruption.

“If this office is made aware of such acts we will be able to act. If people see incomplete projects, they conclude it’s corruption.”

Dawood Adam, a senior official of the National Prosecuting Authority, told journalists that the director of the NPA, Menzi Simelane “sends his deepest condolences and calls for calm”. – Additional reporting by Chandre Prince