City grants title deeds to address land ownership

MORE than 13 700 historic deeds have been transferred to previously disadvantaged beneficiaries since 2012, thanks to a concerted effort by the City’s Human Settlements Directorate to clear the backlog of title deeds from as far back as 30 years ago.

Mayco member Benedicta van Minnen said the transfer of deeds was an important and emotive situation the City wanted to address because so many people had not been able to own property during the apartheid era.

In 2012, Mayor Patricia de Lille requested that the directorate of human settlements accelerate its programmes to ensure the City transferred outstanding deeds to recipients of city-provided subsidy housing. At the time, this amounted to about 30 000 outstanding deeds.

De Lille had said the policy action would start to address apartheid’s legacy of depriving individuals’ basic ownership rights: “South Africa’s history is littered with land deprivation, decades-long ‘leases’ and the like, to entrench spatial divisions and reinforce the toxic notion that cities did not belong to the majority of the population.”

She added that this process would take time, but that she was confident the City could make the redress initiative a success.

Van Minnen said that in an effort to speed up the processes, some of these transfers were actively being driven by the City’s project managers of human settlements housing projects, while others were being attended to at a legal level.

Khayelitsha, Bloekembos, Wallacedene, Nomzamo, Nyanga, Philippi and Wesbank were some of the areas where title deeds have been transferred since 2012.

Challenges that slowed down the transferring process included unsigned sale agreements, untraceable beneficiaries, incomplete applications, and ownership legalities.