Durban - The Archbishop of Durban, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier said that the controversial move by the Ingonyama Trust Board to convert permission-to-occupy certificates into residential leases would penalise the poor - and leave them poorer.
The trust’s plan is set to be challenged this month in the Pietermaritzburg High Court by civil society groups and individuals backed by churches including the Catholic Church, the KwaZulu-Natal Council of Churches and the Lutheran Church.
Judge Jerome Ngwenya, the chairperson of the Ingonyama Trust Board, did not respond to calls and texts.
Napier said that among the benefits of a permission-to-occupy certificate was that residents did not have to pay rates or taxes, and that they were given security of tenure for the property for as long as they needed it and they would not cede it to the state or the local traditional authorities.
He said the church was interested in ensuring that the state did not start penalising poor people for not being able to buy and own land under their names, but have it under the traditional authority.
“Sure the lease agreement is a long-term lease, but in the original agreement there’s nothing said about rent. If this goes ahead, people will suddenly find themselves susceptible to rent payment which I believe will be increased incrementally every year.
“For the private householder to have something in their possession for maybe a generation or two and then suddenly be given a lease agreement that they must sign and pay rent for, it just doesn’t sound fair. It will make the poor poorer than they are,” Napier said.
Resolve
He said the Catholic Church was handling several cases that it hoped the Ingonyama Trust would help to resolve.
“We have two churches where the problem has arisen, the Umndeni Oyingcwele Mission in Hammarsdale and Our Lady of Lourdes in KwaMashu. The trust says that we’re not able to get permission-to-occupy certificates and they’re insisting on a lease agreement,” said Napier.
He said the trust wanted the KwaMashu church to purchase land it had occupied for more than 50years.
“I have handed the dossier to our lawyers to look at before I commit to actually taking action,” Napier said.
Thabiso Mbhense, the lawyer from the Legal Resource Centre representing the applicants, said that the conversion from the permission-to-occupy certificates to residential leases would negatively impact on rural communities under the Ingonyama Trust.
“With the permission-to-occupy certificates, people do not pay rent. Although they don’t have title deeds, they live on the land as though they own it because they are protected by the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act.
“This act says that nobody can remove them from the land and nobody can take their property without their consent,” Mbhense said.
He said that under the lease agreements people would have to pay rent and have the size of their land reduced because they could not afford to pay for large pieces because the rent depended on size.
Mbhense said unmarried women, in particular, now had to reduce the size of the land they occupied for residential purposes.
He said that under the agreement system, when residents’ leases were over or if they could not pay the rent or were evicted, they could not demolish any structure on the land because this would have to be left in the hands of the trust.