There are competing claims to some of the land to which the Constitutional Court has already ruled that the Richtersveld community has a restoration right, it emerged on Wednesday.
The announcement was made in the Land Claims Court in Cape Town by the state’s lead counsel in the Richtersveld land hearing, Gerrit Grobler, who described it as a ”serious matter”.
He told Judge Antonie Gildenhuys that the Land Claims Commission office in Kimberley had informed him that there were another two claims on a 715ha area named Brandkaros.
This information had not been available either in an earlier round of the hearing, or when the Constitutional Court made its ruling in 2003.
He said he was not ”dishing out recriminations”, but it meant that Gildenhuys could not make a final order on the restoration until the issue of the competing claims was resolved.
Gildenhuys said it appeared that the Constitutional Court order had been granted erroneously, and suggested that the legal teams think about it when the court adjourned for the day.
”How we’re going to solve it will require more wisdom than we can summon this afternoon,” he said.
Brandkaros is a strip of land on the south bank of the Orange River mostly occupied by a farm run by diamond parastatal Alexkor, though there is also a small community diamond-diggings project there.
The competing claims are by families who had rented land there for decades, and though they were lodged with the Land Claims Commission years ago, they were only recently processed.
Grobler told Gildenhuys that the chief land-claims commissioner for the Northern Cape said he had informed the families he intended to dismiss their claims as frivolous.
They had 30 days to respond, which had not elapsed.
Earlier, Gildenhuys turned down an application in which the Richtersvelders’ lawyers asked that the state and Alexkor start leading their witnesses on environmental aspects of the claim before the testimony of the community’s environment witnesses was completed, or, failing that, for a postponement.
The lawyers said in papers that the state and Alexkor had failed to produce a ”substantial body” of documents relating to the environmental disputes in the hearing, and that their witnesses needed time to study them.
The state, however, dismissed the claim about the documents, and said switching the order of the witnesses would be impractical and ”highly prejudicial”.
Grobler also told Gildenhuys that a postponement was unnecessary, and that if he did grant one, he should restrict the areas that the community’s witnesses eventually testified on, and that the community should have to ask special permission before calling fresh witnesses.
”Otherwise it will be like a war against little ants. When you kill them, they come again,” he said.
Gildenhuys did, however, rule that the hearing would stand down for a ”short period” to allow the community’s lawyers to study and consult on a number of documents recently made available to them.
The community is claiming about 84 000ha of diamond-bearing land, plus compensation of up to R2,5-billion for diamonds removed and environmental damage. — Sapa