The government may not like it, but land invasion is a reality in South Africa, writes Louis Freedberg
Isaac Williams, a land invasion officer for the Tygerberg municipality, has an uncanny ability to spot an unauthorised shack amid the hodge-podge squatter settlements in Khayelitsha and surrounding townships.
To help him do the job, the city has set up a 50-person land invasion unit which patrols the townships on a daily basis, painting yellow numbers on shacks and tearing down those that spring up overnight.
“There are five new shacks coming up,” Williams says, pointing to some cardboard and corrugated iron shacks in the Mfuleni section of Khayelitsha as he patrols with members the unit. Some carry plastic shields, tear gas, guns and batons.
“They weren’t here late last night when we were patrolling here, so now we’re coming to break them down.”
The establishment of the unit, and a similar one by the Cape Town city council, dramatises the failure of the government to meet the burgeoning housing needs in Cape Town and other urban areas.
With an estimated shortage of three million homes, and the migration of some 300 000 rural dwellers into urban areas each year, squatters like 25-year-old Portia Butela Bukula say they had no choice but to occupy land illegally.
“We came here in 1997 when it was just veld here, and there was nothing here at all,” says Bukula, who has two children and was living with friends in the Harari section of Khayelitsha across the street.
But then relatives of her friends showed up, and she was evicted. “They told me I had to find my own place.”
Bukula then built her shack on what authorities said was a choice piece of land overlooking False Bay. The land had been earmarked for the development of a middle- income housing suburb called Monwabesi Park.
Two years later nearly 10 000 people – and 2 000 barely livable shacks – occupy the area. There is no running water, electricity or sanitation. The prospect of middle-income housing ever being built here has evaporated.
Bukula says life is hard enough without the threat of having her shack torn down. Just that day, Williams and his men tore down an extension that she was trying to attach to her tiny two-room shack.
“The police are coming here all the time,” she says. “They let us build our houses, but then many people came, and they are now telling us we have to leave.”
Attempts by municipalities to prevent land invasions seem entirely consistent with national government policy.
“No government wants people to just go and occupy land,” says Geoff Budlender, director general of the Department of Land Affairs. “If this was to become a mainstream way in which people can get land for housing, you’re going to have it all over the country, and it is going to be impossible to manage urbanisation and provide decent services.”
No one knows exactly how many “land invasions” have taken place or are currently under way because no one has done a national or even a provincial survey.
But it is clear that in communities across the country people without housing are simply seizing land – from Oukasie outside Brits near Pretoria, to Malawi Camp, a jot of land occupied by 170 shacks off the N2 near Cape Town airport.
The problem may be far bigger than the authorities are willing to admit. “Land invasions are happening on an unprecedented scale,” says Kobus Pienaar, an attorney with the Legal Resources Centre which represents the Monwabesi Park squatters. “The problem is that the African National Congress party line is dead against land invasions, and it is as if the whole problem is not spoken about. But you can go into any township and you will see people building informal housing on any possible vacant piece of land.”
The government has taken steps to prevent the arbitrary evictions that were commonplace during the apartheid era. To that end, Parliament passed a law in June 1998 which reflects the government’s ambivalence about squatter evictions.
The Prevention of Illegal Eviction From and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act outlaws land invasions, but also says that once people are living in a shack, authorities must get a court order before they can evict them.
That, officials complain, is an expensive and time-consuming process. Another constraint is that once someone has been living in a shack for more than six months, the government has to make sure alternative housing is available before an eviction can take place. “It is now a matter of constitutional law that you can’t demolish someone’s home without a court order,” says Budlender. “The days when people would go to work in the morning, and come home to find their homes demolished are over.”
Nonetheless, the effect of the law has been to create a cat-and-mouse situation in which squatters try to build a shack and move into it as quickly as they can before law enforcement officers can tear them down.
“We’re putting an enormous amount of resources into the managing and monitoring of invasions of land,” says Mandla Maxongo, director of community services for Tygerberg.
The municipality is spending a month on overtime for the land invasion unit alone. “That kind of money could be far better spent to address the shortage of housing, and improve the quality of life in these areas instead of using it to prevent land invasions.”
Maxongo says he sympathises with the squatters’ plight, but that they should be patient and put their names on official housing lists.
But to shack dwellers that is a patently absurd option. There are now 40 000 people on the official waiting list for homes in Tygerberg, and the council is only managing to build about 10 000 units a year.
In Cape Town officials say there is a shortage of at least 150 000 housing units. Nearly 40 000 people are on the official housing list there as well.
“We’re not coming close to addressing the needs,” says Philip Jacobs, Cape Town’s municipal housing committee chair.
The root of the problem, says Pienaar, is that authorities are failing to release land quickly for people to build their houses on.
“It is a ridiculous situation,” says Pienaar. “Instead of releasing land for people to occupy, the state is simply taking a hard line against any land invasions, and it is creating a pressure- cooker situation where people out of sheer desperation are forced to take the law into their own hands and invade land.”
He says that authorities should follow the example of Gauteng, where five “reception areas” in and around Johannesburg have been set aside where homeless people can settle.
Once people are on the land, authorities provide them with rudimentary services, but their names go on official housing lists. These areas have helped relieve the pressure of housing the estimated 20 000 new people who stream into Gauteng each month.
Adding to the pressure to invade land is the fact that often it is the most practical way to jump ahead of thousands of people who have been waiting for years on official housing lists.
“If people want to get the ear of the government, there is no quicker way to get officials, politicians or ministers to come and see them than to occupy land,” says Joel Bolnick, director of People’s Dialogue, which raises funds for self-help housing projects around the country.
“If they want to create a negotiating space, perhaps the most effective way to do that is to first occupy land and then to negotiate, otherwise the bureaucracy doesn’t respond to their demands.”
In many cases, authorities try to work out an arrangement with squatter leaders to prevent new shacks from being built as they try to cope with the ones already there. But this can put local leaders in an almost impossible situation.
When Tygerberg’s squatter control forces showed up at Malawi Camp, they noticed that a new shack was being built. They warned Philip Heuwel, one of the leaders of the settlement, that he had to stop the shack from going up.
“These people are coming out of desperation,” Heuwel says, complaining that his life would be in danger if he did anything. “They are forcing their way in here, and there is nothing I can do.”