The municipality of the surfing village of Port St Johns on the Wild Coast has been accused of engineering community divisions and rushing to settle a land claim to bail itself out of bankruptcy.
Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana has signed off a R92,7-million compensation settlement.
She has also put in place a restitution programme for 2 362ha of the original 3 473ha that the Caguba community in the Eastern Cape coastal village is claiming.
The Caguba Community Development Trust (CCDT), representing about 2 260 claimant households, has been holding out for a land restitution settlement.
The trust claims that the national land affairs ministry and regional land claims commissioner Linda Faleni ‘at all material times colluded and assisted†the Port St Johns municipality in ensuring that the Caguba community was denied the total restitution of land that was progressively taken from it from the 1920s onwards.
The CCDT also says that after a deadlocked meeting on December 6 last year Xingwana and Faleni reneged on an agreement to convene a technical team to draw up an integrated development plan that would include proposals from the community.
The area’s coastline and plant and animal biodiversity have made it a popular getaway for tourists, with backpacker hostels and lodges dotting the landscape.
The disputed land is not merely the idyllic and prime ocean-front property along the Wild Coast but also the Port St Johns village centre itself, the Silaka Nature Reserve, the Bulolo Dam and holiday resort, the Mount Thesiger Forestry Reserve, a local golf course, a former military base and airstrip, a former naval base and surrounding agricultural land.
According to the current settlement the municipality will control more than 760ha of the restituted land, including the former naval, air and military bases, the golf course and the town extension.
‘We have been cheated because we didn’t want the money, we’ve always wanted all our land back,†says 60-year-old claimant France Fono.
Fono says his family was initially moved from the Mount Thesiger area in the 1920s to what is now the Port St Johns village centre and again in the 1960s to the Caguba area about 15km from the coast.
Paul Saliwa of the Transkei Land Service Organisation, which works with landless rural communities on matters of land restitution and tenure, said his organisation had run workshops with the Caguba community regarding their rights to the land and helped lodge the initial claim in 1995.
‘Some people are taking the money. They are saying R80 000 for a family, but once that is divided up in the family it’s not a lot,†says John Mtambeki, a Caguba resident.
‘We still want to know what will happen to the land given to the municipality. This municipality has no proper plan for roads, no proper plan for development so I want to know what their plans are now for this land.
‘I also want to know why the minister has decided on this patch-patch-patch settlement of land for us. This land claim could stop us depending on a municipality which does very little for us,†Mtambeki continued.