Pretoria - The Gauteng community safety portfolio committee will meet with residents of the Afrikaners-only community of Kleinfontein outside Rayton, east of Pretoria, next week, it said on Wednesday.
Committee chairman Jacob Khawe said in a statement he would meet with community leaders to discuss the process regarding feedback of an inquiry into the community.
The committee held an inquiry with the community in November last year.
This was to deal with allegations that police were hindered from performing their duties in the community.
The committee invited community safety MEC Faith Mazibuko, station commander of the Boschkop police station Colonel Schoombe Reinsburg, Brigadier Welcome Kweyama and the chairman of the Kleinfontein board of directors to give evidence at the inquiry.
Members of community were also given an opportunity to make oral presentations.
The committee would meet next month to finalise and adopt a report and would then convene a second meeting with the community in June.
“It will be in this public meeting where the portfolio committee will have an opportunity to deliver the inquiry findings to the public,” Khawe said.
“We thought that it is proper for us to engage with the very same community that were part of the inquiry before we make the report available to the public.”
Last week, the Democratic Alliance Youth protested outside Kleinfontein's gates. The property covers almost 800 hectares.
Kleinfontein controlling body chairman Jan Groenewald insisted in a debate with the DA on Thursday that the criteria for its residents were not based on race.
Inhabitants of the settlement, which had existed for 21 years but came under the media's spotlight last week, merely wanted to live out their values in seclusion, said Groenewald.
This would include providing themselves with their own “municipal” services.
“The people that have free access to Kleinfontein, who can apply, are Afrikaner. (They) are basically people who associate themselves with our Voortrekker history, the Blood River Covenant, and all these historical facts relating to our struggle for independence for the Afrikaner people,” Groenewald told reporters.
The criteria to live in Kleinfontein was “based on cultural, language, traditional, and religious beliefs”.
“You cannot use race as a base to determine anything,” said Groenewald. - Sapa