The Carlisle Bridge flashpoints
FROM PAGE 11
Dreyer Pieterse is an incredible philanthropic guy. He has built schools on his other farms, provided transport and clothes. All the government pays is the teachers. He has done tremendous work for local communities.
• We are trying to broker a deal with the government to buy Goodwood (an 800ha piece of land outside the Woodlands game fence). They don’t want to buy Woodlands. If they won’t I can sell them five or six viable farms at the same price. Woodlands is not a good stock farm anyway. There are predators, heartwater and burrs in the grass which are bad for wool.
Goodwood is very viable. There’s irrigation there, it has 7km of water frontage, it’s good for cattle. The idea was to settle the Woodlands labour force there. The government is looking at it but the process is slow.
TOTOMANI SKEYI
What the memorandum says
• Boyi Skeyi was evicted when the farms in the Carlisle Bridge area were converted to a game farm and had most of his belongings demolished in the process as he was not provided with transportation to the township for his belongings.
• In 2016 the Carlisle Bridge farm workers and dwellers found out that a portion of the identified land in the Carlisle Bridge area had again been sold to a commercial farmer who has transgressed the tenure rights of Totomani Skeyi.
Mr Totomani Skeyi is a 68 year old man who has lived and worked in the Carlisle
Along with other farm workers and dwellers in the area, Skeyi has used the land to sustain his livelihood through subsistence and commercial farming.
The new owner is clear- ing the land and in the process has destroyed Mr Skeyi’s fencing and produce he had still not harvested.
The new owner, through mediation of the farm manager, has also asked that Mr Skeyi move to another farm in the area and leave the house and land that he has been using for most of his life.
What Robert Gradwell says
There was no garden when Mr Pieterse bought Skelmdrift. There was nothing there. The transfer went through three weeks ago but he has been in occupation for three months.
During my 10 or 12 trips to the property I never noticed any garden there. The bulldozer operator didn’t either – and we would never give an instruction to damage someone else’s property.
Mr Skeyi said he had planted half a pocket of potatoes in the ground next to the house. We have assured him that if that was the case, we will compensate him for those and give him more.
Mr Skeyi is still an employee of the seller. He has been assured that as soon as he moves to the new house, we will identify a suitable piece of land for growing vegetables and fence it off for him.
We have assured him that we will help him.
What Keith Gradwell says
Mr Skeyi has not been on that land for most of his life. He has lived there for the past 10 years. That certainly gives him rights, which must be addressed. But the fact is, he has indicated he is willing to move to his new house.
WHAT GROCOTT’S SAW
Grocott’s Mail this week visited Totomani Skeyi and his family in their cottage on Skelmdrift. Skeyi showed the piece of land where the bulldozer had been, and there were bulldozer tracks there. He said there had been a vegetable garden there which he had watered with water supplied by a Makana water tanker.
He and his wife Thozamile Skeyi said they would move into the new house at Goodwood, or eMakaleni (the place of aloes) as it is known locally, as soon as the water and electricity were connected and the final coat of paint had been put on.
Skeyi has started building a pig pen and chicken hok next to the new house.