JUSTICE MALALA: The fire from below is raging and land occupation is gaining speed
'We cannot follow the ANC’s mealy-mouthed and half-hearted attempts at the job, because much of it is being orchestrated by Jacob Zuma to put a fire under his successor Ramaphosa'
EXTRACT
In all three places the men offering or selling stands were not ANC or EFF. They said they act with the authority of the City of Tshwane, but didn’t have titles. They were “entrepreneurs”.
Our fourth occupation was near my mother’s village, New Eersterus. Shacks were being put up at a very quick rate. Later on in the day, driving back to Joburg, I passed by Wallmansthal, a settlement whose land restitution was finalised in 2007. The original, black, owners are still not back on the land. Instead, for the umpteenth time, the land is being sold off by “entrepreneurs” at R8,000 a stand.
What’s going on? Well, 28 years after a whole wave of Mandela villages were born across SA, it is clear that there is still hunger for land, certainly urban land. What I saw may be led by unscrupulous “entrepreneurs”, but they are responding to a real need.
I should visit my mother more often. Driving to see her last weekend, I saw what political scientist Professor Somadoda Fikeni calls “the fire from below” – people no longer just demanding land, but being encouraged to take it and actually doing so. In the space of one hour I saw four different land “occupations” in and around Soshanguve and Winterveldt, just north of Tshwane. Later the same day I saw a fifth one in Wallmansthal, Tshwane. All on a Saturday afternoon.The first one was near Soshanguve Block BB, on the Soutpan Road. This is a place that saw the first set of land occupations in 1990 when, in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, huge chunks of land were settled. The growth of this first wave has led to the development of a massive, ever-growing township. Last week’s occupation there was a sedate affair. A man had put up a sign saying “OFFICE” in huge letters and a motley group was putting up incredibly small shacks in the vast open space behind his sign. My ...
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