Evicted occupiers bed down outside Civic Centre

“Our homes are just unoccupied structures to the City of Cape Town,” said 55-year-old Nkosiphendule Nkantini from Kraaifontein.

Nkantini joined residents from informal settlements in Khayelitsha and Kraaifontein and activists from the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) outside the Cape Town Civic Centre on Wednesday.

Braving the rain, they had brought mattresses, many covered in a pattern with the South African flag, to bed down in protest for the night on the square outside the Cape Town Civic Centre.

The protest was against evictions carried out by the City which the SJC says are illegal. It comes ahead of a court case to be heard on Thursday. On 11 April 2018, land occupiers, with the support of the SJC, filed papers in the Western Cape High Court to interdict the City from demolishing homes and evicting them from Island informal settlement in Makhaza, Khayelitsha.

Most of the applicants had their homes demolished on three occasions in March and April, “without an eviction order as the law requires”, said the SJC in a media statement. The SJC said the City relied on an interdict, which is not an eviction order,

The City also relied on “the ambiguity of the term occupant, exploiting the fact that most people are not physically in their homes during the day or do not have many belongings”. The City demolishes “homes as mere structures” the SJC said.

Nkantini, a father of five, said, “They say our homes are unoccupied because we do not have the kind of furniture they have.”

His shack has been demolished four times in Marikana informal settlement, Kraaifontein. “They demolish, we build the same day, because we have nowhere else to go,” said Nkatini.

The SJC said Wednesday’s protest was also over the lack of a response from the City to a memorandum handed over on Human Rights day in a march organised by the SJC, District 6 Working Committee, Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City.

The memo called for the City to fast track the process of buying or expropriating land in Marikana, Philippi, and to commit to a plan to upgrade informal settlements.

Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Development Brett Herron addressed the crowd. He said: “Housing is our biggest crisis not only in Cape Town but in South Africa … The number of houses that we need to provide far exceeds what we are able to provide within our budget and within our human resource capacity.”

Herron said currently there were 320,000 people on the housing database waiting for houses.

“We know that in the next 15 years we need to give tenure to those living in informal settlement. We want you to feel secure and own the land that you live on,” Herron told the protesters.

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