The provincial minister of housing in Limpopo, Machwene Semenya, has been subpoenaed by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to answer accusations of having dumped 237 evicted families in the veld near Lebowakgomo, with no basic services.
”The situation at Turfpan was desperate,” Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, the SAHRC commissioner in Limpopo, told the Mail & Guardian this week. ”We needed to intervene and help these people.” When the SAHRC visited the evictees’ new site in May they found that only 17 tents, some with holes in them, had been erected and the site had neither adequate pit latrines nor a water supply.
But provincial officials described a different scene when they toured the site a month later. Ishmael Malale, a spokesperson for the provincial department of housing, says when Semenya visited the site in late June, after receiving the SAHRC subpoena, her delegation found only 47 people living at Turfpan — a figure supported by officials at the Lepelle-Nkumpi municipality, where Turfpan is situated. Malale said the discrepancy could be explained by the fact that many of the evictees might have ”gone their own way” after their eviction.
Malale also said the department had found 10 water standpipes and pit latrines — and ”14 old tents and 15 new blue tents at the site”.
Gloria Masemola, an SAHRC advocate who has been managing the Turfpan proceedings, says she recorded 237 families when she visited the area and charged that the government is trying to justify its actions by claiming only 47 people lived there now.
The municipality’s corporate service manager, Joas Satekge, says the municipality is working with the SAHRC to provide services. He claimed there are plans to build houses for the evictees they found at Turfpan and said Lepelle-Nkumpi had already supplied them with water. ”But we are trying to discourage people going and just occupying land,” he says.
The case has once again highlighted the government’s responsibility in housing its people. McClain-Nhlapo says the reality is that people do get evicted, but the Grootboom judgement in the Constitutional Court meant that emergency plans should be made to accommodate the evictees in a way that their rights are not violated.
”We are not suggesting that these people go back to the land where they were evicted, but alternative land should have been found to accommodate them in the long term before they were evicted,” she says.
Although Malale says that the first Semenya, who assumed office in May, knew of the situation was when she received her subpoena, the commission says it approached the provincial minister’s office to intervene in the community’s plight but did not receive any feedback. Ultimately it subpoenaed Semenya as well as Moeng Phasha, Lepelle-Nkumpi municipal manager, to appear before the commission. The hearing was postponed for two weeks after legal representatives for Phasha and Semenya asked for more time. McClain-Nhlapo and fellow commissioner Tom Manthata agreed to Semenya’s office convening a task team to investigate the evictees’ plight. The task team will report back to the commission this week.
The families were evicted in May this year from Lebowakgomo Unit R and Unit BA, near Polokwane, and moved to Turfpan 21km away, after the Lepelle-Nkumpi municipality won a court order to evict them.
Masemola says their eviction led to the abuse of their basic human rights. ”In this relocation process, the municipality did not apply its mind to issues such as water, housing, sanitation, electricity and healthy living conditions.”
Malale said after the SAHRC approached Semenya, she summoned the mayor and senior municipal officials to gather information about the case and visit the affected areas.
This is not the first time the community has been evicted from the Unit R area. Squatters were first evicted from the area in 1997. After the eviction, reconstruction and development programme houses were constructed and the rest of the land was earmarked for middle-income housing. But soon the squatters were back on the vacant site because they could not find alternative accommodation elsewhere. The municipality made plans to accommodate them, but because of the demarcation of new municipalities, the plans were never followed through.