Eviction debacle shows Cape Town’s lack of empathy
Cape Town, we have a problem. Yes, all of SA’s cities have large numbers of people living in informal settlements, and of them Cape Town is not the worst.
About 19% of Cape Town’s 1.8-million households live in shacks, not quite as bad as Johannesburg, where the proportion is 21.7%.
All cities are also subject to continuous and ongoing land invasions to the extent that each one has “an anti-land invasion unit” to act swiftly against unlawful occupiers and remove their structures.
Johannesburg has what is in effect a private army — the notorious Red Ants — whose modus operandi is more akin to a battalion going into battle than a modern law enforcement body.
But in Cape Town, thousands of households live in backyards, paying substantial rents to the owners, contributing to huge pressure for land to settle on.
There have been 209 attempted land invasions since January 2019.
Most public land in the city is not owned by the metro council but by the national government and the city has not been able to get these released for residential development.
There is also a horrible history of “coloured preference” in housing and other opportunities, which lingers on in toxic race relations and divided communities.
But even with these additional constraints, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Cape Town is less empathetic to the plight of its poor people, as the obscene treatment of Khayelitsha resident Bulelani Qholani showed last week.
Having lost his job and been evicted from his backyard shack, Qholani sought to erect a new home on a piece of open land, on which there were already several informal structures.
What he may or may not have known — there is no noticeboard up on the site — is that the land has been earmarked for a large bulk water infrastructure project by the city, which is essential to expanding Khayelitsha’s water supply.
The existing structures on the land belonged to early occupiers the city had tried to evict in April, but failed after a court ordered a stop to the proceedings.
The court order stated that those who were there could remain until the end of the lockdown, after which the city would need to follow the normal eviction procedure.
This gave the city comfort that it could legally remove any more occupiers — an interpretation with which the Legal Resources Centre disagrees.
It believes a court order must first be obtained.
Qholani, along with four other households, arrived nearly three months later. Shortly afterwards — he says 14 days; the city says two at most — the city arrived to remove him, claiming this was not an eviction (prohibited during the lockdown) but a land invasion and therefore a legal removal.
Though the city has appointed an independent firm to investigate the incident, it has also at every opportunity given its own version, which is that Qholani orchestrated his naked confrontation.
Mayor Dan Plato and righthand man JP Smith say video footage shows Qholani fully dressed and interacting with officials before disappearing into his shack and re-emerging naked.
Qholani’s account is that he had stripped down to have a bucket bath when the antiland invasion unit pulled him out of his house.
But whether this was a political ploy by Qholani or not makes little difference to the indignity he suffered as law enforcement officials manhandled him and ripped down the shack.
It also makes little difference to whether the officials behaved correctly.
In some ways, as Thuli Madonsela pointed out on Twitter, it is worse that Qholani felt he had to resort to stripping naked to avoid eviction.
Evictions, say UN guidelines, should not be carried out in a manner that violates dignity, uses excessive force or in inclement weather.
These principles also apply in the normal course of law enforcement. But they are not principles with which the city’s anti-land invasion unit or public representatives are familiar.
Three weeks ago, as a bitter cold front swept through Cape Town, the unit brought down structures in Hout Bay, claiming they were “unoccupied structures” and could be legally removed.
And in the Qholani case, a WhatsApp chat between officials and councillors has an official stating that the illegal structure “needs to be demolished, naked man or no naked man”, and mayoral executive member Malusi Booi replying “yes”.
At a parliamentary hearing held by the portfolio committee on co-operative governance and traditional affairs on Friday, Plato was adamant that the city’s eviction policies did not amount to “a war against the black man”, as MPs claimed.
“If I hated black people, I would never have visited any black area. I have got a lot of black friends,” he told them in an ingenuous tone. — BusinessLIVE