Scourge of bent land laws
THE letter by Lihle Shewa of eThekwini Municipality (Thursday, June 21) about prosecution of illegal land users in the municipality refers.
Since 1997, residents of Florence Nightingale Drive in Chatsworth lodged official complaints with the municipality regarding use of residential property for business purposes, but nothing has been done.
Over the past few years, many wealthy businessmen have bought residential houses cheaply from desperate residents and converted them to offices thereby destroying a once peaceful community.
Instead of enforcing the law, the eThekwini Municipality stopped impending legal action against wealthy businessmen on this street due to political interference. This was reported in the Daily News (30 April 2003) by Veven Bisetty.
In the early 1990s some open land in the area was made available to people on a waiting list for land. They were sold the land by the municipality on condition that land be used for residential use.
However, some attorneys who were well-connected bought the land and used it for offices – conveniently close to the Chatsworth Magistrate’s Court. Over time many other attorneys and businesses have moved in with total disregard for residents.
We, the residents, have since become the victims of many violent crimes as crime activity has increased tremendously due to unoccupied business premises at night.
Some of the houses have been abandoned by the busi- nessmen and are used by drug addicts and criminals to launch attacks on residents. In one day this year we had eight burglaries in the area – even the businesses were robbed.
The alarms of some of these businesses go off continuously during the night and we cannot get any sleep nor can our kids study in peace.
If there are any legal minds out there that can give us advice – we would like to sue the municipality for failing to protect the residential status of our investments
We worked hard and built our houses with the hope that we would retire here in peace. Why should we sell and move because of corrupt city officials who are being bought off by wealthy businessmen? SOLDIER OF JUSTICE
Chatsworth