1 month ago
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The Johannesburg high court has stopped the City of Joburg from evicting without a court order people who allegedly invaded land in Rabie Ridge Ext 1, in Midrand, last year.
Residents are alleged to have illegally occupied the land, which is owned by the city, since September last year.
However, the City sent Johannesburg metro police multiple times to demolish the structures and remove them, but residents always returned to the land and rebuilt their shacks.
Delivering the judgment in the matter, judge Stuart Wilson said what the city did was “spoliation, pure and simple”.
In 2020, the City earmarked the property for the development of 1,200 temporary accommodation units in an effort to assist those living in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions in the informal settlements nearby.
“The project was said to be an urgent response to the Covid-19 outbreak, necessary to allow people living in informal settlements in the Rabie Ridge area to move to accommodation spacious enough to allow effective social distancing. In this way, the City sought to enable Rabie Ridge informal settlers to take steps to avoid the transmission of the Covid-19 virus,” read the judgment.
However, despite concrete slab foundations for some of the units being laid, no further steps were taken to develop the property since the temporary shelter project was announced.
Wilson said the city stated that the project was a “failure” and that it now intended to put the land to some other housing-related use.
“The acute phase of the Covid-19 outbreak has of course now ended, but the applicants (residents) say that the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions the City identified in the area have been allowed to fester,” he said.
Wilson said residents who were frustrated by the city's failed promises to alleviate those conditions took matters into their own hands and occupied the land and constructed shacks on it.
Seven days later, however, the City's metro cops and private security contractors demolished the shacks. The residents moved back on the property and reconstructed their shacks as soon as the City's employees left the area.
“This incited a further demolition operation, again at the behest of the City, acting through its police department and its security contractors. Once the dust settled on that operation, the applicants reoccupied the property, only for the City to remove them once again.”
Wilson also said he found it hard to “conceive of the desperation that must have driven the applicants to move on to land they had no right to occupy, and to rebuild their shacks each time the city destroyed them.
“However, I was not called upon to balance the City’s interests against those of the applicants. The question before me was whether the City was entitled to demolish the applicants’ shacks without a court order.
"On the undisputed facts, it was not so entitled, because the applicants had plainly established possession of the land and their shacks before the City demolished them.”
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