sale
Mike Loewe
Transport parastatal Transnet is planning to sell scores of remote railway properties in the Eastern Cape that have become home to hundreds of evicted farm workers and retired railway workers.
The inhabitants of the railway buildings have been renting them from Transnet, which is now poised to sell the properties to neighbouring farmers – the very people who evicted the labourers in the past.
Officials, backed by a Port Elizabeth team of management consultants, have been sent to 150 remote railway stations and sidings in the Eastern Cape in a drive to flog off the land and buildings.
Many of those familiar roadside red-brick houses once built as whites- only working- class accommodation have been gradually occupied by an odd post-apartheid brew of people.
Nobesuthu Francis Ntloko, one of the residents facing eviction, said this week: “We want this place. We don’t want to move to town. The tsotsis are going to kill these old people in the location.”
Ntloko lives with 13 others in a six- roomed labourer’s cottage at Atherstone siding at the end of a ferocious dirt road high in the hills 25km from Grahamstown. Next door are seven more of the simple homes housing about 50 people, most of whom she says are retired farm workers from neighbouring farms who live on their state pensions.
Atherstone sits on a ridge in the Highlands district. The panoramic view of the Gxethu hills is splendid and Ntloko says it’s a neat, peaceful community made up of the elderly and children, 19 of whom she teaches over the road at a drab, whitewashed farm school.
Lali Naido, director of the Eastern Cape Agricultural Research Project (Ecarp), says residents are mainly retired black railway workers and farm workers evicted from adjoining white farms. Her dismay and anger over the process has received the full backing of Albany African National Congress Zonal chair Brian Maloni. Naidoo and Maloni say Transnet officials, who have targeted at least three stations and are probably moving on more across the province, seem pushed to make a quick sale to neighbouring white farmers. They say a meeting at Kinkelbos last week of Transnet, people living in the houses and surrounding farmers turned ugly, with residents accusing Transnet of trying to sell them out.
Naidoo says their concern was not without grounds: she is dealing with 17 eviction cases from one farm in the Kinkelbos area and two from another.
Her main objection is that Transnet has forged ahead with its plans without adequate consultation with the government’s departments of housing and land affairs, regional authorities and NGOs.
Transnet also seems unaware of the existence of the Land Claims Commission and that subsidies for displaced, historically disadvantaged people who wish to lay claim to their land are once again available.
“Transnet’s process is preventing proper debate and exploration of the best options for people needing the land.” She says that for farmers – who already have “sufficient land” – to be allowed a cheap land grab will only exacerbate the critical shortage of land for the use of farm workers and marginalised rural people, and that Transnet’s actions will only lead to “more social instability and will fuel tension between land owners and occupiers”.
Maloni says the residents – and the ANC – perceive Transnet as favouring farmers in any buy-out.
Transnet manager of communication and publications Carel Mulder says it is a “business and management decision” to sell the sidings and confirms that Transnet is hoping to sell its properties to commercial farmers. Sale contracts would contain a clause stating that the “status quo” on the properties would have to be maintained. However, another option considered by Transnet is to demolish the structures on the land to be sold.
He says Transnet is under pressure to get rid of under-utilised assets. More consultation with communities would be desirable but with Transnet making a R425- million loss last year, “we must make a move”.
It seems not a significant move, financially: properties and homes will go for a “very cheap” price and the money generated will “not be a massive amount”.