Marikana ruling is ‘watershed’
COURT CAN PAVE WAY FOR SERVICES City of Cape Town must negotiate with private owners to buy land.
With no running water at home, residents of Cape Town’s Marikana slum trudge to public spigots with buckets and make the dash to portable toilets set up on the informal settlement’s edge, close to the busy city airport.
Children play on narrow, litter-strewn dirt paths that separate densely packed corrugated metal shacks and crude electrical cables dangle precariously overhead.
In early November, a woman was electrocuted by a wayward cable, said community leader Thembani Landu on a recent tour of this informal town.
At sunset, he said, the 60 000 residents make sure they are safely inside their barbed-wired protected shacks because, with no streetlights, the settlement plunges into darkness – and danger.
During one particularly brutal weekend in October, 11 people were killed in an outbreak of the gang violence that routinely plagues Marikana.
Even the settlement’s name runs with blood: it honours the 34 people who died when police opened fire at striking miners in Marikana, in North West, in August 2012.
The residents badly need a break. Now, they finally dare to hope their living conditions may improve, thanks to a landmark legal ruling over who owns the land they occupy.
A judge has ordered the city to negotiate to buy the privately owned land the Marikana settlement residents have occupied.
The site is made up of three parcels, two owned by separate commercial development groups and a small plot owned by an elderly South African woman.
With the city as landlord, residents hope to gain basic municipal services, such as legal electrical hook-ups, water access, rubbish pick-up, police patrols and street lighting. “It would be a big victory for us,” said Landu, who was among the original squatters who began occupying the formerly empty land in Cape Town’s Philippi area in 2012. “It would open us up to electricity and sanitation service.” Advocates and lawyers involved in the case say the August 30 ruling is unique because it, for the first time, sets a framework to resolve ownership disputes over occupied land by having a municipality deal directly with the property’s owners. Lawyers on both sides told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the ruling was a watershed that could set a precedent for millions of South Africans.
“Once the case is decided on appeal, it will be a landmark decision for land ownership,” said Martin Oosthuizen, a Cape Town lawyer who represents one of the commercial consortiums which owns the land.
According to government statistics, 13% of South Africa’s 16.9 million households live in informal settlements –
It will be a landmark decision.