Residents invade land to build homes
‘Unstable soil makes building unsafe’
Fed up with the slow pace of housing delivery‚ hundreds of people have invaded vacant state land earmarked for a low-cost housing project in the Cato Crest informal settlement in Durban.
The residents descended on land on Monday and yesterday and started clearing the bushes and allocating themselves plots to start building shacks. Happy Zwane told Sowetan’s sister publication TimesLIVE that she was clearing the bush so that she could build her two children a home. “I have two children and I’m not married and I want to clear a plot for them so that when I die they would have a place to live. I don’t have a place of my own because I don’t own the place I live in.” Others complained about being used as voting fodder by political parties and blamed the ANC for failing to deliver the houses for them since the beginning of democracy. Local community leader Thulani Ndlovu said as much as he did not sanction illegal land grabs‚ there was little he could do because residents have been complaining for years about lack of adequate housing‚ but nothing was being done to address the issue. “At the end of the day‚ we end up with a situation like this because those things that are supposed to be done‚ have not been done for more than five years. And what do you do when people have been complaining about this issue? Some people even die cominto plaining about the same issue.” Ndlovu said the eThekwini municipality had promised it would build 75 low-cost units in the area but did not know what had caused the delay. Yesterday‚ the residents cut swathes of grass and demarcated areas under the watch of Durban metro police and later the public order policing unit. Municipality spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela said they were aware of the invasions and were “doing everything in our power to stop them”. He said the land being invaded “cannot be developed for housing purposes as unstable soil makes it unsafe”. “More than 100 houses have been built in Cato Crest‚ but the influx of people has meant that land is not available for housing development‚ and the number of families waiting for houses continues to grow.”