Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Cope members being evicted and downgraded

Minister of Public Works Geoff Doidge was granted an order in the Cape High Court yesterday to serve notices on two Cope parliamentarians living in the Pelican Park parliamentary village to inform them that he intends evicting them from their homes.

After the court granted the order, Dennis Bloem and Bishop Lekoba Tolo were served notices by the Wynberg sheriff's office informing them that Doidge would go to court next month to get them evicted from the complex near Zeekoevlei.

They would be moved from their three-bedroomed houses, called Flamingo and Harrier, to smaller two-bedroomed houses, numbers 87 and 85 Pelican Park.

The reason they are to be evicted is because they resigned from the ANC.


Yesterday Bloem was defiant: "They informed me and Bishop Tolo that we were living here illegally, but we are still parliamentarians so we will challenge that eviction."

Bloem has lived in Pelican Park as an MP for 15 years. The village, he said, was originally built in the apartheid era to house the "Indian MPs" in the old tricameral parliament.

Court papers said when Bloem and Tolo had resigned from the ANC, they had lost their membership of the national assembly in March. They had also lost all the rights and privileges that went with that office, including the right to occupy houses in the Pelican Park parliamentary village. - from IOL

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