Rustenburg – Members of the SA National Civic Organisation (Sanco) in Monnakato in North West prevented the Rustenburg local municipality from evicting illegal occupants of low cost houses (RDP) in the area on Thursday.
“There is a high court case pending regarding allocation of RDP houses. We waited for the sheriff of court to come with an eviction order and he did not,” said Sanco branch chairman Thabo Mkhonbo.
He said they wanted to torch Rustenburg municipality’s public safety cars deployed at the area for the eviction.
The Rustenburg municipality took Mkhobo and others to the North West High Court seeking the court to restrain them from threatening municipal official and interfering with the process of allocation of houses to beneficiaries and evicting or ejecting beneficiaries they were allocated.
This was after Sanco members in Monnakato removed people who did not appear on the provincial list from the houses.
Mkhonbo said a list of beneficiaries they obtained at the provincial department of human settlement in Mahikeng when compared to the one from the Rustenburg municipality showed that the two lists are not the same.
“You will find your name in the provincial list, but on the Rustenburg list the name does not appear – it is that of someone else,” Mkhonbo said.
He said the former ward councillor colluded with official in the housing department of the Rustenburg municipality to manipulate the provincial list and replace bona fide beneficiaries with their preferred candidates.
Municipal spokesperson Thapelo Matebesi later told a local radio station, Mafisa FM that the eviction was overdue. He said over 100 houses were illegally occupied in Monnakato.
In June this year, Human Settlement MEC Collen Maine said a permanent solution to prevent illegal occupation must be formulated.
“A permanent solution to avoid illegal occupation of the completed low cost houses in the province must be formulated. We are not going to allow any illegal occupation and the sporadic cases that erupt in different municipalities must be stopped. Beneficiaries are not going to be denied the opportunity to occupy their houses. We are going to go door to door and compare lists. Those who have occupied the houses illegally will be removed,” said Maine.
On the lists which the African News Agency (ANA) has seen, one house was allocated to Olaga Thelejwane in the provincial list. The very same house allocated to Thelejwane on the provincial list had been allocated to another person on the Rustenburg list. Three beneficiaries signed that they occupied their houses in 2017, which is in two years’ time from now.
It was found that one of the RDP houses was transformed from a place of residence into a tuck shop.
“These are the things we are fighting. We want people who have applied for house and have been approved to occupy their houses, not other people,” said Maine.
The Rustenburg municipality tweeted in the morning that: “To demonstrate our intolerance for illegal occupation of houses, we r evicting all illegal occupants @ Monnakato RDP houses 2day”.
ANA