RIGHTS-SOUTH AFRICA: Police Evicts Squatters

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Jul 13 2001 (IPS) - In the end, only one shack was left standing in Bredell — near Johannesburg International Airport — and that was wholly due to the intervention of the almighty, or rather his emissaries.

On Thursday at lunch, the demolishers moved in to destroy about 300 shacks — they finished on Friday afternoon, stopping at Puleng Elisa Lidimo’s shack.

The 83-year-old woman’s home, which doubled up as a church for the community that sprang up last month, is now gone. With the intervention of the South African Council of Churches, the demolishers hired by the local sheriff agreed to a stay of eviction to give the church time to find an old age home that will take Lidimo in.

The remaining 50 squatters bundled Lidimo into her shack and threatened violence if the eviction was not stopped. It was a small victory after an awful tension-filled week. A leading non- governmental organisation (NGO) in the land sector called it a “dark day in South Africa’s history”.

Next week, her shack will go too, leaving the piece of fallow land empty once again, while its average 500 residents will have “gone back to where they come from”, as Land Affairs minister Thoko Didiza has decided they must.

The eviction, requested by Didiza, was granted by the court on Tuesday — in a case watched by the world’s television cameras. With Zimbabwe just next door, all eyes are on South Africa for signs that the land problems bedevilling its neighbour will hit here next.

When news of the illegal land occupation first leaked a fortnight ago, the markets took a dip and analysts suggest the Rand’s nosedive this week (the currency is at its weakest ever) is owed in some measure to jitters that Bredell may be a sign of things to come.

Some of this was selective analysis – the Rand’s slide was largely the result of turbulence that afflicted all emerging market currencies this week.

It wasn’t the people of Bredell that are the powder keg, but rather South Africa’s racially skewed land redistribution.

In fact, the area in Bredell is largely state land, with a small portion owned by a white farmer. But in large measure, the state’s action amounted to taking a sledgehammer to a gnat.

Didiza, who at 36 years old, is the youngest Cabinet minister, was unnerved by the market reaction and the media glare. She took a strong line — which has earned the derision of some in civil society. Her statement that the Bredell people should “go back to where they came from” has earned her derision in the media, with a cartoon depicting her as sending people back to square one.

If anything, the experience in neighbouring Zimbabwe should serve as a fillip to South Africa’s land reform programme. Seven years on, there has been little substantive land redistribution.

In the main, land reform has amounted to financial compensation for land lost under apartheid. Poor people have quickly spent the money and not invested it in land.

Government has paid dearly – way above market rates – for expropriated private land. Its first attempted forced expropriation earlier this year went awry after a national outcry when conservatives again raised the Zimbabwe spectre.

Another factor often not considered in the land reform debate is that the state is a massive landowner. An audit of its portfolio has shown that the three spheres of government own nearly 240,000 properties worth between R120 billion and R300 billion. (One US dollar is equal to 8.30 Rand.)

If this was released, it would go a long way to feeding the land hunger that is the real threat to South Africa’s stability.

“A pro-active approach is needed,” says Glenda Glover, the director of the Surplus People Project. “Land is a natural source of wealth and effective land reform will secure our long-term stability.” As a service organisation, she says that it can take up to five years for land transfers to take place — it takes longer to transfer state land than it takes to negotiate claims on private land.

While legal processes drag on, the “make-a-plan” people like those who occupied the Bredell land are always on the go. The urban centres around the major cities like Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town reflect constantly moving populations in search of shelter.

State officials say six million people live as squatters in the urban areas. There are many, many arrive-by-night communities like Bredell where desperate people set up home. The poor use strips of corrugated zinc, hammers and long nails to erect their homes. The poorest of the poor use four wooden poles placed two metres apart, with just a heavy sail thrown over.

Water is carried in 20-litre drums from neighbouring townships and towns; toilets are holes in the ground. Bredell hit the headlines this week because Zimbabwe has etched the issue of land in Africa onto the international consciousness. And also because a rival political party to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) “sold” plots to the squatters at R25 a piece.

But, to witness the people at Bredell as their homes were cracked apart by demolishers was to know that this was no more a serious event, than the litany of difficulties that is their experience: unemployment; poverty and dislocation. There was stoicism about some. “It cost R150 to come here,” said Shadrack Lamola, who wore a star of the Zionist Christian Church pinned to his lapel. He sat on a neighbour’s chair left in the open, under a wintry sun.

Like many others, Lamola and his wife Catherine Lamola, came to Bredell when they heard that plots of land were available for R25.

Most Bredell residents had come from the neighbouring township of Tembisa, where they rented rooms or back-yard shacks for an average R250 a month.

Most of the residents claimed unemployment, but eke out a living in the informal and casual sectors by occupations like hawking fruit or chicken pieces; parking cars or working as security guards.

Perched on her sideboard, also left in the sun by the demolishers, Catherine took a break from taking down her own shack. “They treat us like dogs,” she said, watching as the crowbar clutching men approached. She cried, just for a little while, before joining her husband as they piled their home onto a truck and made off for only god knows where.