A Groot Marico community has slipped through the cracks of the restitution process after purportedly being promised houses after the 1994 election. The people of the 1972 Wonderfontein community, now living in Lehurutshe near Groot Marico, were evicted from their land during the apartheid years. Under the impression that the houses would be given to them as compensation for eviction, they did not submit a restitution claim before 2001, missing the deadline of December 1998.
”We were misled by the false information we received from the then-Groot Marico town council,” says Mbuti Montlhe, chairperson of the 1972 Wonderfontein claimants.
But the Zeerust Local Municipality, which succeeded the Groot Marico council, claims that no houses were ever promised to the community.
The people were evicted from the land — a township on the farm Wonderfontein — in June 1972 when armed policemen and officials from the Peri-Urban Health Board, a municipal institution, forced them on to trucks with the few possessions they could salvage.
”We lived in this township for more than 70 years,” said Montlhe. ”We were told we could not take our corrugated iron doors and frames to our new homes. We even had to leave our stock and poultry behind.”
But the community received a ray of hope in 1994 when Piet Mpodu, an employee of the former Groot Marico council, told the evictees the council would be building houses for them on their old land, now known as Reboile Phase One, and ”that we should come and register our names”. About three years after they had registered for houses, Montlhe inquired when the promised dwellings would be built, but the town council told him it did not have a record of their registration.
The community went to register again, but Montlhe said the last roll for housing in Groot Marico did not have a single name of the people who had originally signed up. His community was only put on the list in July this year.
Berlinda Pitso, spokesperson for the Zeerust municipality, told the Mail & Guardian that Mpodu had not had the authority to promise the community new houses. ”Mpodu was a worker in the water and cleaning services. He went on pension and passed away a year later. He had nothing to do with administration or housing allocations.”
She said 56 new houses were built at Reboile in 1996 after a Department of Housing employee organised a registration process. The remaining 193 stands were awarded to people according to strict housing-board regulations.
At present the Zeerust municipality has a waiting list of 600 people. ”It does not mean that if you register for housing, it is definite that a home will be allocated to you,” she said.
In 2000, Montlhe first wrote to the Land Claims Commission to inquire about reclaiming the land. After several meetings with the commission in 2000 and 2001, which encouraged the community to engage in the restitution process, the North West Rural Action committee helped it submit a claim. Some elements of the claim were validated by the commission in 2002, but the government decided in 2003 that under no circumstances would it extend the expired deadline. The claim was finally rejected in May this year.
”It is beyond the powers of the commission as a whole to extend this cut-off date,” the adjudicating land claims commissioner, Thembi Malinga, told the community. She advised it to seek help in the alternative land-reform programmes offered by the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs.
Pitso says that, in any case, the community has no rights to the land because the municipality’s information indicates that Wonderfontein was not in the Groot Marico records and so was never proclaimed. The community was therefore considered an illegal squatter camp.