Lawyer slams trust’s new plan to lease land

It will negatively impact churches and rural communities in KZN

THE PLAN of the Ingonyama Trust board to convert permission to occupy certificates into residential leases has been slammed by the lawyer representing applicants, who are opposing the trust’s plans.

The applicants, including the KwaZulu-Natal Council of Churches, the KZN Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and civil society organisations, claim that this contravenes the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act.

Thabiso Mbhense, the Legal Resources Centre lawyer representing the applicants, said the conversion from permission-to-occupy certificates to residential leases would impact negatively on rural communities under the Ingonyama Trust.

The application is expected to be brought before the Pieter maritzburg High Court this month.

Judge Jerome Ngwenya, chairperson of the Ingonyama Trust Board, did not respond to messages yesterday.

“With the permission to occupy certificate, people do not pay rent… and although they don’t have title deeds, they live on the land as if they own it, as they are protected under the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act.

“This act says that nobody can remove them from the land and nobody can take their property without their consent,” Mbhense said.

He said that under the lease agreements, people would have to pay rent and have the size of their land reduced because they could not afford to pay the rental amount for a larger piece of land, as the rent paid depended on the size of the land an individual occupied.

Under the lease agreement, married women, in particular, would have the land that they occupy reduced because they would not be able to afford to pay rent to the traditional authority for large pieces they occupied for residential purposes, Mbhense said.

“A lot of people cannot afford to pay for the land that they’re currently occupying. And in terms of the lease, it states that if you vacate the land, the property is left in the hands of the Ingonyama Trust.

“If you can’t pay the rent or you are evicted, you can’t demolish your property or any structure on the land,” Mbhense added.

He said some of the applicants had received letters from the Ingonyama Trust’s lawyers, insisting that they pay rent.

“Some women were told that they could not sign lease agreements because they were not married, which forces them to have a male partner or relative signing the lease on their behalf.

“You find that your land is signed under another person’s name, either a boyfriend or relative, and it leaves them vulnerable to whoever signed for the land,” said Mbhense.

He said some of their clients were churches, which had handed over the completed version of their court papers to the KZN Council of Churches two weeks ago to go over them.

He said they would proceed with the court application once the KZN Council of Churches returned the papers.

“Some churches are affected because they’re also now being forced to sign lease agreements, when they have always had permission-to-occupy certificates,” Mbhense said.

The Catholic Church’s Wilfrid Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, noted that there were two cases of churches in Hammarsdale (Umndeni Oyingcwele Mission and KwaMashu (Our Lady of Lourdes) where the trust said the churches could not receive permission-to-occupy certificates.

“They are insisting on a lease agreement. In the case of the church in KwaMashu, they want us to purchase the land, which we have occupied for over 50 years,” Napier pointed out.

Ingonyama Trust board contravenes the Informal Land Rights Act