by Thulani Magazi and Elliott Sylvester, Cape Argus 25 March 2002
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The city of Cape Town and Khayelitsha residents are heading for a huge showdown with hundreds of residents involved in land grabs at the weekend, after evictions and water cut-offs for failure to pay arrears.
Several areas were seized: in Site B, open land between Graceland and Mandela Park, and land at the end of Mew Way, opposite the TR section informal settlement.
And thousands more threatened to invade vacant sites in the Khayelitsha area, in spite of police efforts to flatten dozens of shacks already built.
In an attempt to defuse tension, Khayelitsha ward councillors and the area’s police station commissioner, Director Rasimiti Shivuri, yesterday held two huge public meetings, one at Khaya Bazaar shopping centre and the other at the Eyethu Centre, both attended by thousands of angry residents.
Worried councillors said land grabs would threaten any forthcoming developments, but residents vowed to forge ahead with land invasions, citing moves by the council to evict them, auction their houses and cut off water supplies as the main motivating factors.
Some angry residents claimed that they had been without water for more than two weeks and others complained that the council was auctioning off their homes.
The council’s interim manager for revenue and debt management, George van Schalkwyk, said Khayelitsha residents owed R231 million in arrears, a figure which had been building up since 1998.
On Friday the city council sold several houses in execution after its first attempt to auction five homes failed on Wednesday, when no one turned up to bid.
By late yesterday the situation in Khayelitsha was tense. As the meetings went on, more than 100.residents continued marking sites on open ground near the end of Mew Way Road, opposite the TR section informal settlement.
Nombulelo Dyasi, 33, said she was a backyard tenant who paid R250 to the owner every month for services and rent, but she was faced with eviction and her water supply had been cut.
“We’ve got no p1ace to stay, we now need our own place. I am tired of staying in a backyard. The police must leave us alone.”
Dyasi said police had visited the area several times to destroy shacks, but residents would not be intimidated.
While dozens of residents complained of their dire plight at the meetings, for others it was an opportunity to fulfil their dreams.
Xolela Masibulelane, 25, said he. saw people marking out plots and decided it was time that he erected his own house.”As a man, you need to have your own house. I think you know what I am talking about,” he said.
A former mayor of Khayelitsha and a leader of the ANC caucus in the city council, Clifford Sithonga, said he understood residents’ anger but condemned land invasions.
Sithonga said the area was “in crisis”, and lashed out at the Democratic Alliance-led unicity.
“The land grabs started on Friday and people are taking any open space in the area, but we have decided to give the leadership a role to solve the problem,” he said. Sithonga said the current situation was going to cause more problems in Khayelitsha, in a sense interfering with President Mbeki’s urban renewal strategy, aimed at developing such areas as Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain.
“If the council is evicting them, automatically they will invade any open space, but that is not a solution to the problem,” he said.
“The authorities do not have the interests of Khayelitsha at heart.”
But Sithonga urged residents to refrain from land grabs.
“Whatever development plans we have, we will not be able to implement them, every conceivable space would have been occupied illegally. And that would be in the interest of the DA, that there would be no development in Khayelitsha.”
He said a regional protest involving all the affected areas, including Gugulethu, Delft and Mitchell’s Plain, had been organised for Wednesday at the municipal offices. Sithonga said residents were not opposed to paying for services, but wanted the council to come up with an indigents policy for unemployed and the elderly.
George van Schalkwyk said last night that between 10 and 20 houses were scheduled for auction in Khayelitsha next month alone.
“But we hope people will come forward and make arrangements” before the houses could be sold, he said.
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