Speedy answers being sought for land claims on Ballito and Zimbali

DURBAN: The Land Claims Court has been approached by a community to expedite their claim to vast swathes of the north coast, including upmarket Ballito and the Zimbali resort, which has been dragging on for years.

The community have claimed land they say their forefathers were evicted from during colonial times, including what are now upmarket suburbs and agricultural land, some of it owned and managed by Tongaat Hulett sugar farming and property development company.

The Makhosi Khosi Communal Property Trust, which represents the Qwabe clan, launched the claim in 1994. But the matter has been dragging on since then while new development has taken off, including in the resort town of Ballito and Zimbali.

The trust says some of the prime coastal land from the La Mercy area to Umhlali was unfairly excluded when their claim was gazetted in 2006.

The trust’s lawyer, Vusisizwe Khoza, said a statement of claim had been filed with the Land Claims Court in Randburg to force the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights to fast-track its claim and to include the luxurious coastal suburbs.

“The matter is in court, but we are still going through pretrial conferences (between claimants and commission’s lawyers) to set a court date for the matter,” he said.

To further complicate matters, competing claims have also been lodged.

Khoza said he could not discuss how the claim would impact on the development of business, industry and residential properties as the matter was sub judice.

The coastal land is part of the bigger claim which covers vast hectares of land between

The matter is in court, but we are still going through pre-trial conferences

the Tongaat and Umhlali rivers, and also spread from the coast inland to Waterfall near Ndwedwe, which mostly consists of sugarcane farms.

Other affected towns include Westbrook, Salt Rock, Shaka’s Rock, Dolphin Coast and Umhlali.

The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights placed a notice last week calling for people who wished to lodge claims on 130 properties to do so at the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform in Pietermaritzburg before the end of August.

Makhosi Khosi Communal Property Trust’s deputy chairman, Phillip Gumede, said the colonial regime had displaced about 1 280 families between 1913 and the 1950s.

Gumede said the Qwabe clan leader, Inkosi Sizibeni Qwabe, who was his grandfather, was first removed from his palace in Ballito to Tongaat and later forced to relocate to Waterfall, where he died in 1968.

He said the community lodged the claim immediately after former president Nelson Mandela opened the process in 1994. To date, Gumede said, they had received six farms.

The commission’s senior legal administrator, Makgalemela Maake, confirmed that the Qwabe claim had gone to court.