Residents of emergency housing in Durban protest against eviction
Province says they earn too much to qualify to stay, but they disagree
Many residents say they do not earn more than R3,500 a month and therefore do meet the criteria for housing. Photo: Tsoanelo Sefoloko
Scores of people who lost their homes in the 2022 KwaZulu-Natal floods marched to the provincial Department of Human Settlements on Tuesday to protest against a plan to evict them from their emergency housing.
They were complaining about a letter sent in April by the department saying that those who do not meet the necessary criteria for government housing must vacate their housing. This includes those who are earning more than R3,500 a month.
The protesters marched from King Dinizulu park to Dr Pixley ka Seme Street to hand over their memorandum.
The marchers, who live in several centres of Emergency Transit Accommodation (ETAs) in Durban, said they had received the letter but even those who earn R3,500 a month cannot afford to buy land and build houses.
Zandile Luthuli said she decided to be part of the march because the province was wrong about her earnings. She said she works occasionally in a supermarket but earns less than R3,500 a month. “I don’t know how they came up with that figure that said I am earning more than R3,500. Most of the time I am a street vendor selling chips and sweets at the school gate just to put food on the table,” said Luthuli.
Another protester, Zola Yalo, said he was shocked to receive the letter. “Most of the people who are working here, just like me, won’t be able to get any financial assistance from the bank.
“It seems as if government wants to be challenged in court because that is where we are going to end up defending ourselves.”
Thulane Bhengu, chief operating officer at the department, said all due processes had been followed when profiling those who qualified to remain in the ETAs and those who did not.
He said in total there are 1,069 families and only 182 families would be affected.
“Those who don’t qualify will have to build their own houses, because remember we have already accommodated them for more than three years.”
“We will go through their memorandum and respond within 14 days,” said Bhengu.
Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast
Previous: Lottery underspends R1-billion in grants
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.