Agrinitti Xepe (62) has been living in a temporary shack in the Sol Plaatje informal settlement near Soweto for more than six months. She has to care for her family of six on 18 square metres of floor space.
”Every day I have to move the table and the closet to the side in order for us to have a place on the floor to sleep,” she sighs. ”It is very hot and often we don’t have running water.”
The settlement is a dusty and desolate place — mine dumps punctuate the skyline and there is litter everywhere. Unemployment is rife, and local children are said to be dropping out of school as there are no schools in the near vicinity and transport costs are too high.
The former residents of the Mandelaville informal settlement near Diepkloof in Soweto have always been moved around.
They were forcibly evicted by court order in January 2002 from Mandelaville after having lived there for 24 years, since 1976. The residents had subsequently been granted permits to live in public buildings vandalised during that year’s student uprisings.
However, after the first democratic election in 1994, they were told they did not hold residency permits and were advised to apply for Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing.
As early as 1998, representatives of the City of Johannesburg promised the Mandelaville residents formal housing, according to a Gauteng government housing document obtained by the Mail & Guardian Online. In 2000, according to a September 2005 Sunday Times article, an African National Congress councillor allegedly approached residents, offering improved living conditions in return for votes.
Nothing came of these promises. In 2002, the residents were relocated to Durban Roodepoort Deep, a disused mine compound in Roodepoort that is now known as Sol Plaatje.
Order of the court
Five years later, most of the about 1Â 500 households in Sol Plaatje are still waiting for a proper place to live — but there is some hope on the horizon. The city council has started to upgrade some of the aged mining hostels, and some residents have been accommodated. It took a number of court cases, however, to force the council’s hand.
The first court case ordered the council in September 2004 to provide the residents with formal housing within two years.
But according to the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, which assisted the community with filing the court cases, more pressure was needed to get the ball rolling.
”It was only after the second court case, in which the high court judge held the mayor of Johannesburg personally responsible, that effort was made to provide the community with housing,” explains Stuart Wilson, a research officer with the centre.
A Gauteng provincial government report drafted late last year says: ”The community’s relocation to Sol Plaatje was highly contested. Residents were evicted from the Diepkloof site with a court order, stating that the city council had 12 months from the date of eviction (January 7 2002) to provide proper housing to the community.
”Despite this, to date most of Sol Plaatje residents are still living in shacks on the new site. In addition, Sol Plaatje is still isolated from schools, clinics and other essential services.”
The Sol Plaatje residents’ frustration at the slow pace of the project is increasing by the day, community representative Vumile Velaphi told the Mail & Guardian Online during a visit to the site.
”The contractors are extremely slow in upgrading the existing hostels and are not building enough new RDP houses,” Velaphi explained. ”Some people are living in temporary zinc shacks for more than a year, waiting to return to the hostels.”
The do-it-yourself zinc shacks, situated on a desolated land strip near the construction site, are currently accommodating about 200 households. Many of the families comprise more than four people.
”During the day, these shacks become incredibly hot because of the sun burning on the flat roofs. And, as the shacks have poor isolation, people will be very cold with winter setting in,” Velaphi said.
Project manager Geoff Thompson of Greenwich Projects, which is contracted by the city council to build the new homes, says it will take another 18 to 21 months until everybody is provided with housing. ”The coming months we are planning to build 50 to 60 houses per week. It depends on how quickly we can vacate the residents that are currently inhabiting the remaining hostels,” he said.
After the M&G Online questioned why the city council had not provided the community with proper housing yet, the mayoral committee member for housing Strike Ralegoma said the project is a ”big challenge” but is, at present, ”under construction and had increased noticeably”.
”Before reaching this point [the start of construction], a number of administrative, technical and procurement steps had to be taken so that the project could be correctly implemented in compliance with the applicable legislation,” he explained.
He said it is important to note that the funding for this project comes from the provincial government and not directly from the City of Johannesburg. ”Therefore, important steps had to be completed before construction could commence.”
The council said the completion, preparation and approval of a project business plan, a project budget and funding approval from provincial government were the biggest hurdles to overcome.
Ralegoma confirmed that families have begun moving into their new homes, but could not say when all residents like Agrinitti Xepe and her family would be able to leave their hot, dusty shacks behind for good.