‘They were breaking our shacks and shooting us’

Residents of the Princess informal settlement near Roodepoort protest on Albertina Sisulu Road (Formerly Main Reef Road).Residents are protesting a lack of housing and service delivery in the area. Picture: Wesley Fester 210114

Residents of the Princess informal settlement near Roodepoort protest on Albertina Sisulu Road (Formerly Main Reef Road).Residents are protesting a lack of housing and service delivery in the area. Picture: Wesley Fester 210114

Published May 25, 2016

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Pretoria – Two people died in Hammanskraal this week but on Wednesday the community of squatters the deceased were attempting to evict from municipal land insists it acted in self-defence.

“We are a peaceful community. We are not dangerous. Those people who have died, we send our heartfelt condolences to their families. But those people lost their lives and, ourselves as members of the community, we were acting out of self defence,” said a representative of the squatters, Fortune Mathabathe, while addressing a joint media briefing with Gauteng MEC for Human Settlements Paul Mashatile in Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria.

“We were defending ourselves because we had people coming out of nowhere, breaking our shacks and shooting us with rubber bullets. We didn’t know what is (was) happening. We want to say, as the community we feel vindicated and relieved by the intervention of government on this matter. There is no more dangerous Hammanskraal. There is no more trouble.”

 Mathabathe urged numerous police officers and journalists who had been in the area since the two were killed on Monday to vacate the area.

“Speaking on behalf of the community, I would like to make make a humble plea. After everything is settled and done here, all these police and journalists must just leave our area in peace. Now we are portraying an image that Hammanskraal is this dangerous place that people cannot go to,” said Mathabathe, who was wearing ANC regalia.

A female journalist was almost attacked by the squatters earlier on Wednesday. Her notebook was torn and all media were told to leave the area.

Mashatile announced on Wednesday afternoon that the eviction of thousands of squatters who occupied land partly owned by the Tshwane municipality and a royal family had been halted.

“We thought that we shouldn’t be punitive in a situation where people really believe that they were not doing anything wrong to be on those pieces of land,” Mashatile said while addressing reporters after a meeting with community leaders, Tshwane metro officials, and representatives of the Kekana tribal authority.

“We also agreed that whilst we suspend the evictions and the demolitions, we need to bring order in the area. The first thing we are doing is to set up a steering committee chaired by MMC Joshua (Tshwane Human Settlements member of mayoral committee Joshua Ngonyama). The steering committee will look at who was in the area and removed or whose shack was demolished. They will then return them there.”

Mashatile emphasised that no new squatters would be tolerated on the piece of land before it is developed for human settlement.

“They (steering committee) will ensure that nobody else comes in. They know the numbers, there are about 3,500 people in the area. We don’t want the shacks to mushroom. The community is going to help us to secure the place so that when we start with development, they get the preference,” he said.

At least two people, who were part of the team trying to evict the squatters, were killed on Monday when an eviction agency tried to move the people who have occupied the huge expanse of land.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Gauteng North regional chairman Solly Msimanga said that the ANC must be blamed for the chaos in Hammanskraal. He urged government to halt the evictions.

“We want to lay this squarely at the door of the ANC. I was here in the early hours on Monday, I had been called at around 4am and was told that there is violence and unrest,” he said.

Msimanga told reporters in Hammanskraal that he “met people who said they had been told by an ANC councillor here” that they have the right to occupy that piece of land.

“It goes even worse because there are those (squatters) who are claiming that they paid something like R2,000, R2,500 or R3,000 per stand,” said Msimanga.

“One gentleman told me that he has bought a piece of land and the following day when he came to put up a structure, there was somebody already there on the ground. That means that land had already been sold to somebody else.”

Msimanga said it was corruption that had caused the violence and the two deaths.

“This is something that the ANC could have stepped in [to stop] early. The ANC could have made sure that they responded to the people and addressed the issues right from the beginning. They failed to do that, and that is why we ended up having people being murdered on the ground,” he said.

Meanwhile, police vehicles were patrolling the Hammanskraal streets, which were still difficult to travel on owing to the rubble left by protesters.

Motorists had to navigate their way around all kinds of obstacles on the roads, including piles of dirt.

African News Agency

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