Peter Dickson
Magistrates ignorant of the law are sending hundreds of farm worker families out into the cold and back to the darkest days of apartheid in the Eastern Cape.
And officials of the provincial Department of Land Affairs have told land reform lobbyists that the hard-won Extension of Security of Tenure Act (Esta) is not a priority.
The East London-based Border Rural Committee, a National Land Committee (NLC) affiliate that helps Border-Kei communities, also told this week of recalcitrant landowners dispatching lawyers and threatening land reform activists.
In terms of Section 4 of Esta, occupiers have the option of access to a R16 000 state subsidy for secure settlement, while people aged 60 or older who have lived and worked on the farm for more than 10 years can stay until they die. But the committee, which has been monitoring Eastern Cape farm evictions since October last year, says most evictions have been the result of unprocedural common law applications.
Magistrates routinely issue court orders for eviction based on the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951 – a law repealed in June last year. The Land Claims Court then has to waste valuable time to set these orders aside.
The committee’s complaints to the provincial Department of Land Affairs has yielded little results. The department deals with the Eastern Province Agricultural Union which, the committee says, claims recalcitrant landowners are not union members.
The committee says that it is only in the Eastern Cape that land affairs and NLC affiliates do not work together, and the provincial department’s relationship with organised agriculture “raises questions about who sets the agenda” for land reform.
Of 34 cases reported to trained committee eviction monitors in the area over the past six months – involving 256 people, 116 of whom are children – there have been no convictions, and police in several centres said they would not act against farmers.
“Hundreds of people are falling through the cracks in the system and nobody knows,” says committee officer Janet Liebenberg.
The committee recently organised workshops for lawyers on the new legislation, but fewbothered to attend; the committee was told in a meeting with department director Mike Kenyon last week that evictions were not a department priority; and only two magistrates pitched for a meeting on the issue with the Department of Justice, “and they had to read up on it”.
The committee says Stutterheim police last year chased away people reporting criminal evictions, saying they could only act in the event of assault. Police assisted in evictions and were unaware of the new legislation, the committee said, adding “we often have to photocopy the law to show them”.
In Bedford recently a policeman said his station had received “no general minute” on the new law and asked for a “motivating letter” before adding that “we won’t go against any farmer”.
After evictions at Kidd’s Beach recently, a station commander told the committee: “It’s over – what must we do?” The committee took the matter up with police legal services, which promised to investigate, “but there has been nothing to date”.
With labour relations one of the main causes of evictions – 21 of the 34 cases reported to the committee were labour issues – the Department of Labour has been more sympathetic. The committee says the labour department “even showed verbal commitment and said we can always contact them to send out inspectors”.
But during a meeting on the findings of the evictions report, the labour department was more concerned with the Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, and in channelling disputes through the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration – where farm workers have no representationE.
In a typical case study at the Igoda resort area outside East London last month, amagisterial bungle saw Amatola District Council workers tear down the homes of 30 families before trucking them to a dumping ground at Fort Grey where they faced winter in tents – with no water or sanitation.
The Igoda families, farm workers retrenched by the collapsed parastatal Ciskei Agriculture Corporation, had been living on Igoda state land for three years before the council caved into pressure from local farmers claiming stock-theft problems.
Sources told the Mail & Guardian the council’s eviction application was signed, ironically, by committee board member Pam Yako. Eviction monitors said the sheriff, who should have overseen the eviction, was nowhere to be found, and the demolition was carried out by council truck drivers, mechanics and traffic officers.
Legal Resources Centre attorney Johan Roos said the court had ignored the Illegal Evictions Act, and the council and the magistrate were unaware that the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act had been repealed.
East London attorney Wesley Pretorius later succeeded in an application to have the eviction order stayed. Some of the families have returned to Igoda to try and rebuild their shattered lives, but many remain behind at Fort Grey.
Repeated efforts to obtain comment from the land affairs and justice departments in East London were met with silence this week.
ENDS
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