Cape community unites in fight for land

The legitimate land claimants of Imizamo Yethu, along with the Hout Bay and Llandudno community police forum and the Hout Bay and Llandudno Environment Conservation Group, have applied to the Cape High Court for a “structured interdict” against the City of Cape Town. Full Story….

Action demanded!

“GET rid of your corrupt fieldworkers or close down the offices,” was an ultimatum served to Benchmark for Knowledge and Services by angry demonstrators in Site C last week.

Benchmark for Knowledge and Services (BKS) is a service provider hired by the City of Cape Town to facilitate the processing of tittle deeds in Site C.

The city is running a programme of dedensifying Site C because of double occupation.

The idea is to come up with a general plan of the area.

This means out of two double occuppied sites one person or family will have to leave Site C.

Other families have been relocated to Mandela Park and Kuyasa.

Wiseman Ntloko Sanco, secretary in Site C, said three fieldworkers whose names are known to City Vision are accused of corruption.

He said BKS must take a decision about those three fieldworkers or must close down their offices and leave Site C.

“We don’t need you here. You must go, or we are closing down your offices. We are sick and tired of this.”

“The ultimatum we are giving this office is: help the community or close down.”

Ntloko said their primary grievances were about the three fieldworkers accused of corruption and who are working for BKS.

People come to BKS offices to complete their application forms for houses and tittle deeds.

These forms are then sent to the housing board for approval.

The forms are then approved and the fieldworkers are then sent to that particular or qualified person to hand over the housing keys and that he/she must sign for his new house.

Instead the fieldworkers are alledged to taking those keys and giving them to their relatives and friends and are even selling them at a price.

Ntloko said according to the procedure when that person received her/his keys his name is punched into the computer and registered.

He/she is in return expected to demolished the present shack and move to the new house.

These people become victims of law enforcement who arrive without notice and demolish their shacks.

Ntloko said these people become victims because they never received their housing keys… - City Vision

Shack rebuilding kits ‘not enough’

The materials distributed among fire victims in informal settlements to rebuild their shacks are not enough but “better than nothing”, says Cynthia Boqwana of Masiphumelele.

A single unemployed mother of three, Boqwana’s shack has burnt to the ground twice in less than a year in two of the many fires that have ravaged informal settlements in the city.

Boqwana’s shack was first razed in January. Last month, her shack burnt down again in a fire that left 600 people homeless and 150 shacks destroyed.

Starter packs, comprising zinc sheets, thick plastic, timber poles and nails, are handed out to fire victims by Disaster Management and the housing department.

Boqwana, who is extending her shack, said: “They gave me 10 poles, five zinc sheets, black plastic and nails. I used the sheets for the roof.”

She said she had used the wooden poles and nails for the structure and lined the walls and floor with the plastic before covering them with cardboard and vinyl.

“It (starter pack) is not enough to build another shack, so I am wasting money buying materials.”

Ward councillor Felicity Purchase said 92 starter packs were distributed to Boqwana and other Masiphumelele fire victims last month. Despite this, many residents have had to use metal sheets damaged in the fire to complete their shacks. - Cape Argus

‘We are prepared to die in here’

Squatters living in the unfinished highway bridge on the Foreshore have vowed not to budge when the city comes to move them on Tuesday.

The group of about 40 people, spotted inside a hollow part of the bridge by Central City Improvement District (CCID) authorities during routine anti-crime operations last week, said they would fight the city authorities and the police if they were forced out of their “harmonious home”.

Spokesperson Jonathan Oswald Dreyer said they would not allow anyone into the bridge, and “we are prepared to die in here if they try and force us out”. - Cape Argus

Red Ants -hired Jozi guns- to destroy Cape homes

The controversial Red Ants security guards, who have come in for criticism for their tough tactics in evicting people from council and private properties in Johannesburg, are on their way to Cape Town. The last time the Red Ants were in Cape Town was when they provided security for Shoprite/Checkers during the strike by workers.

Provincial MEC for local government and housing, Richard Dyantyi, recently also warned that he was considering legislation to prevent people from squatting anywhere they wanted.

The Red Ants specialise in evicting people - and their style has at times upset people, violent use of force and armed with crowbars these ‘operationals’ are not part of any National / provincial / municipal policing structure.

Although neither the company nor the Cape Town municipality were at this stage prepared to discuss their future relationship, Weekend Argus has reliably learnt that the Red Ants will be used to deal with illegal squatters in problem areas. Cape Argus

InternAfrica - believes this is NOT the path to take to development.

The World Urban Forum taught us that there should be NO EVICTION WITHOUT CONSULTATION.

The South African Constitution is inline with World Urban Forum and Millennium Development Goals - Cities without slums. None of these documents support forced eviction.

Another 4 die in Cape fires

Four people died over the weekend in two fires in the Western Cape, SABC radio news reported on Sunday.

A man, woman and child were killed in a fire in Khayelitsha, on the Cape Flats where 11 homes were razed.

One person died in a fire at a holiday resort that caught fire on the banks of the Berg River, near Paarl.

No further details were available. - Sapa

RDP houses not weathering the storm

Residents of the Cyril Ramaphosa settlement in George are up in arms over the state of their reconstruction and development programme (RDP) houses. Some of the houses have developed big cracks. Poor drainage in the area has also exacerbated the effect of the recent flooding.

Residents say the municipality is also not heeding their calls, but the local authority says it is already looking into the problem.

Cyril Ramaphosa consists of more than 1 000 houses built on uneven terrain. Scores of houses were flooded recently and this prompted some residents to make holes in their houses to get rid of the water… - SABC

Five die as fires blaze in Cape

Five people were killed in three separate fires in the Western Cape on Friday night, the SABC reported on Saturday.

Another two were burnt to death at Black City informal settlement in Gugulethu when their shack caught alight around 11pm on Friday. The fire also destroyed four dwellings.

At Site C in Khayelitsha a person died in a fire that burnt out two dwellings. - Sapa

3 500 homeless after shack fire

Cape Town - About 3,500 people have been left homeless after a shack fire at Du Noon (near the Doornbach informal settlement) destroyed their homes. - News24

Illegal land invaders face eviction

The city is to evict and relocate 1 000 people who have settled illegally on land reserved for public amenities, road reserves and schools on the Cape Flats. - Cape Argus

Cape homeless families suffer in crowded tent

Displaced Ravensmead families who have refused to be relocated to a site in Happy Valley, Blackheath, are now living in a giant tent in very harsh conditions.

The big tent resounds to the cries of half-naked babies, possibly upset by Monday’s sweltering heat. Johannes Bastian, one of the leaders of the group of about 200 people, said: “This is a condition which is not fit for human settlement. There is strictly no privacy. If it rains, we will be in big trouble.”

There are six toilets and two smaller tents, which serve as bathrooms for men and women, next to the big tent.

Elsie Francis said the council should find them a place to stay quickly.

“We have suffered a lot, but this is the worst,” she said. - Cape Argus

Housing row brewing in Cape Town

Richard Dyantyi, the Western Cape local government, has signalled his intention to change the law in order to build houses for shack dwellers on a 16 hectare piece of prime land in Hout Bay. The move is bitterly opposed by the Hout Bay Ratepayers Association and they have threatened to go to court to stop the move. The legal battle is still far from over. - SABC

Politics maimed delivery & Cape Town

Another regime change and the Cape Town city administration will collapse: that is the judgement of many people who work there. Off the record, it’s no less dire and compelling.

In the civic centre, a senior city-council official confides across his desk that the municipal administration cannot withstand another political transition. “The wheels had come off, we were driving on the rims,” he says, having weathered the latest restructuring. “We are only working out now how much on the rims we are.”

This view comes up frequently among past and present officials, mostly off the record. The repeated restructuring of the staff with its exodus of skilled employees over the past decade has ground the city down; morale is in freefall.

Since 1996, the city council has spent millions of rands exploring new city designs and ridding itself of senior civil servants to facilitate politically palatable bureaucracies for new incumbents.

The skill shedding comes at a time when challenges for the city have rapidly escalated, as it battles to accommodate an expanding population and huge demands on service delivery. It has also to gear up for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Yet its human resources policies have destabilised its workforce. It’s been losing engineers, planners, firefighters, inspectors and electricians monthly for years.

Untold story
The story of Cape Town’s restructuring has never fully been told. Fragmented glimpses of hiring and firing, jumping and pushing, redeployment and realignment have been reported piecemeal. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, the negotiations around the restructuring involved so many secret golden handshakes that few departing civil servants wanted to speak out. Confidentiality clauses hid the true extent of what was a massive and ongoing human resources bungle in an organisation of 23 000 people, tasked to utilise a budget of about R17-billion for the greater good of one of South Africa’s most important cities.

Another reason is the complexity of the interrupted restructuring processes. An official observes that documents detailing city restructuring stand 1,5m high in his office, representing millions of rands of unfinished business.

The frequent changing of the political guard happened in parallel to structural changes in the city as it consolidated from 35 municipalities to seven administrations to a single centralised unicity over the past decade. National policy, including affirmative action, overlaid municipal transformation. The politics of Cape Town, reflecting its racially divided communities, added its own poison.

Each new political party in power wanted its own people on top. This is understandable because politicians need to choose managers who are inspired to implement their policies. But as the DA and the ANC have shuffled in and out of government, there have been far-reaching consequences to this drive, which has spiralled out of control. It started small but developed into a trend that destabilises service delivery…Full Story M&G

House price data - what is ‘affordable’ - and by whose standards?

DATA ON HOUSE PRICES is often bandied about to illustrate the phenomenal growth in property prices in South Africa in recent years. Yet on closer inspection the data turns out to be inconsistent and downright misleading…

…says a house in the middle segment of the market would range from between 80m² and 400m² and would be priced up to R2.6m.

By contrast, houses classified as “affordable” would have to be 40m² to 79m² and priced up to R226 000 this year… Full Story Fin24

Hout Bay reservoir ‘used as open lavatory’

Hout Bay is facing a looming health crisis as storm water flowing through Imizamo Yethu into the Disa River has been found to contain a staggering nine billion disease-causing organisms in less than half a cup of water.

Water Affairs’ guidelines are that water with only 2 000 such organisms in 100ml of water constitutes a “high risk”, even from partial contact with the polluted water.

And the area around Hout Bay’s reservoir, which supplies water to the suburb, is used as an open lavatory by people without access to sanitation.

The Disa River carries the polluted water through the residential area, across the beach into the bay. Mayor Helen Zille said on Wednesday that she had inspected Imizamo Yethu last Saturday after she first heard of the impending court action. “I’ve asked for the original water analysis report. It looks as if we could face a serious health crisis and obviously it is our responsibility to deal with that.”

Zille said she had climbed up to the reservoir on Saturday.

“I didn’t quite expect what I saw. There are no toilet facilities, so the entire area around the reservoir is used as a toilet.”

Margo Haywood, of Hout Bay’s community policing forum, said the forum had been negotiating with the city council for 13 years to sort out the problems in Imizamo Yethu. - Cape Times

Police fire rubber bullets to evict squatters

A confrontation in Ravensmead turned ugly early on Tuesday when police opened fire with rubber bullets at about 300 people living in an unused school building when they refused to be evicted.

Ravensmead Community Police Forum chairperson Tommy Klein alleged police did not arrive peacefully and that they fired several rubber bullets, injuring four people, at the Florida Primary School.

One, Johannes Bastian, a member of the police forum, was badly injured by a bullet that struck him in the face, he said. Klein said Bastian was in Tygerberg Hospital, having an operation. - Cape Times

Phew it’s over for now can breath again… erm… XDR-TB

But does this mean politics will stop hampering delivery?

Or does it mean soccer is now the thing that will build Cape Town?
In the next few days InternAfrica will lay out some numbers just comparing the short term cost of 2010 soccer, and the long term benefits the same price could afford the majority of the citizenry of Cape Town.

So far…

e.g. The housing backlog could be resolved in one year, in the Western Cape, for the same amount the (imported) coach of the SA soccer team will earn in that same year…

Good Luck Cape Town!

The informal settlements of Cape Town are by definition (and lack of sanitation) the TB breeding grounds of the world.

Tuberculosis is the world’s greatest infectious killer of women of reproductive age and the leading cause of death among people with HIV/AIDS. In 2004, the country with the highest incidence of TB was South Africa, with 718 cases per 100,000 people (~70 000 deaths) .

Cape braces for threat of deadly TB strain
XDR-TB has already killed more than 50 people in KwaZulu-Natal - and Western Cape health authorities have yet to determine whether the province faces a real threat from the fatal extremely drug resistant tuberculosis. Full Story….

Manto in hot water after TB death

A Capetonian is seeking to have a charge of culpable homicide brought against the minister of health over his partner’s death from tuberculosis, which he believes was a lethal strain… Cape Times