Imizamo Yethu resident owes R52 460 for house but lives in shack

EIGHT years after she was supposed to move into a government-subsidised house in Imizamo Yethu, resident Priscilla Moloke said she still lives in a shack.

To add injury to insult, she owes R52 460 in water and municipal taxes for the house in which she has never lived.

Earlier this week she was presented with a protection order by the Hout Bay police for raising a stink about the issue of the house, and the fact that it has since 2009 been occupied by various individuals.

The City of Cape Town acknowledged that there were several cases like Moloke’s in Imizamo Yethu, where violence over the re-blocking of the fire-ravaged informal settlement saw the eruption of clashes in which two people have been killed.

Moloke, 57, excited at moving into a house for the first time, after having lived in a shack since she arrived in Hout Bay from Gugulethu in 1987, says she was stunned when visited the house.

“Another man was already living there, when I told him it was my house he told me that he had bought the house from one of the community leaders in Imizamo Yethu for R10 000,” Moloke said.

That man had subsequently moved back to the Eastern Cape but has rented out Moloke’s house to foreign nationals for R3 000 a month.

When the Cape Times visited the two-bedroom house it had been sub-divided into three rooms, in which three separate families lived.

Mayoral committee member for Area North Suzette Little acknowledged that Moloke was a beneficiary of the Masakhane Bantu project which was a community-driven Peoples’ Housing Process project. “The City is assisting in the process of rectifying the title deeds at Masakhane Bantu PHP and the construction of additional units are planned.”