Solidarity: Mass evictions in Abuja, Nigeria

COHRE/SERAC JOINT MEDIA RELEASE

Human rights organisations call for an end to housing rights violations in Nigeria: More than 800,000 residents evicted from Abuja from 2003 to 2007

Please note that the full report is now attached in pdf here

More than 800,000 residents were forcibly evicted from informal settlements in Abuja, Nigeria, from 2003 to 2007, during the administration of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai, according to The Myth of the Abuja Master Plan: Forced evictions as urban planning in Abuja, Nigeria, a new report released by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and the Lagos-based Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC).

COHRE’s Deputy Director, Jean du Plessis, said, “This shocking figure is even higher than the estimated number of people evicted in 2005 during Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe, yet the world has hardly taken notice. COHRE and SERAC urge the current FCT Minister, Dr. Aliyu Modibbo Umar, to make a clear and firm break from his predecessor’s destructive policies that violated the human rights of residents of Abuja and, in many cases, pushed them further into poverty.”

Deanna Fowler, Senior COHRE Research Officer responsible for researching and preparing the report said, “Former FCT Minister El-Rufai and Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) officials created a myth about the Abuja Master Plan to convince people that the Plan justified and necessitated the systematic violation of the housing rights of hundreds of thousands of people so that Abuja would not become ‘another Lagos’. FCT Minister Dr. Modibbo Umar continues to insist that informal settlements must be demolished because
their existence is purportedly in violation of the Abuja Master Plan. However, successive administrations have failed to implement key provisions of the Master Plan regarding housing delivery mechanisms designed to facilitate affordable housing for Abuja residents. Instead, they have resorted to forced eviction as a tool of urban planning.”

Felix Morka, Executive Director of SERAC said, “It is the FCT Government’s failure to implement the Master Plan’s recommendations that has led to the growth of informal settlements and the dire lack of affordable housing in Abuja. The solution to dealing with this problem is not to evict people desperate for housing. The Government should be exploring other solutions, such as in situ upgrading, in consultation with the affected communities.”

COHRE and SERAC estimate that the FCDA has forcibly evicted more than 800 000 people from at least 31 informal settlements, with hundreds of thousands of residents of the remaining settlements living in constant fear of forced eviction. According to The Myth of the Abuja Master Plan, the FCDA has carried out evictions without adequate notice, without adequate consultation with affected persons, without due process and without providing
access to legal remedies. In some instances, FCDA officials carried out evictions without allowing people to retrieve property from their homes. There were also cases of the FCDA using tear gas, beatings and other methods of violence to carry out the evictions.

COHRE’s Fowler, said, “The demolitions have made people homeless, destitute and vulnerable to other human rights violations including violence, theft and rape. People have lost their access to water and sanitation facilities, health care centres, and schools, and have been forced to move further from sources of employment. These widespread and ongoing evictions have resulted in the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of people with
a disastrous effect on health, education, employment and family cohesion. Nigeria has violated the right to adequate housing on a scale and with a persistence that is rarely seen anywhere else in the world. Yet these violations have received little international criticism, in contrast to similar violations in countries such as Zimbabwe or China.”

The former FCT Minister El-Rufai and his administration initiated a policy of mass forced evictions in 2003, in an attempt to redress deviations from the City’s development, as planned for in the Abuja Master Plan - produced by International Planning Associates and approved by the FCDA in 1979. The Plan was created to facilitate the orderly development of a new Capital, in which to relocate the seat of Government away from the chaotic and rapidly
expanding Lagos. The Plan called for the resettlement of people living in villages in what would become the Capital City. However, the Government never fully implemented the resettlement plan. Many residents - often termed ‘indigenes’ - were allowed to remain as the City expanded towards them, and in some cases, around them. Over the past 30 years, these settlements have expanded dramatically as indigenes have supplied land or built and
rented housing to hundreds of thousands of migrants - also termed ‘non-indigenes’ - who came to Abuja for employment and were unable to access affordable housing in the formal market. This resulted in the establishment of at least 65 informal and unauthorised settlements that have been targeted for demolition by the FCDA.

Morka said, “COHRE and SERAC hope this report will bring attention to the systematic and widespread violations of housing rights in Nigeria, and that Dr. Modibbo Umar’s administration and all responsible authorities will take the recommendations of our report into account to address the crisis in the lack of affordable housing in Abuja and throughout Nigeria.”

For interviews or additional information, contact:

Deanna Fowler, Senior Research Officer, COHRE, at +41.22.734.1028 or
deanna@cohre.org

Jean du Plessis, Deputy Director, COHRE, at +27.82.5575563 or jean@cohre.org

Felix Morka, Executive Director, SERAC, at +234.1.764.6299

Court orders new look at R1 land deal

IOL

14 May 2008

by Zelda Venter

The ownership of Mpumalanga’s R1-billion 2010 soccer stadium and 118ha of neighbouring land will be probed by a new board of trustees who were appointed by the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday.

Stop the Xenephobic Attacks in Alexandra and Elsewhere!

ANTI-PRIVATISATION FORUM & ALEXANDRA VUKUZENZELE CRISIS COMMITTEE
PRESS STATEMENT
TUESDAY 13TH MAY 2008

STOP THE XENOPHOBIC ATTACKS IN ALEXANDRA & ELSEWHERE!

DON’T BLAME THE POOR FROM OTHER COUNTRIES FOR THE POVERTY AND JOBLESSNESS IN SOUTH AFRICA - BLAME, AND ACT AGAINST, THOSE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE!

Solidarity with Motala Heights: Crisis Deepens as Violent Intimidation Against the Strong Poor Continues

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Motala Heights Crisis Deepens as Violent Intimidation Against the Strong Poor Continues

Gangster Landlord Continues Campaign of Intimidation with the Support of the Pinetown Police; James Pillay arrested on trumped up charges

James Pillay, ‘Meeting of the Poor Against the Rich’, 17 November 2007

The community of Motala Heights, set on the edge of Pinetown between the factories and the hill that runs up to Kloof, dates back to the early years of the last century and has a rich history. For the last three years it has been under sustained and violent attack from a local gangster businessman who seems to be able to direct the local state, including the police and the Municipality’s Housing Department, at will.

Press Alert: Pavement Dwellers to tackle Mayor Zille

Delft-Symphony Anti-Eviction Campaign Press Statement

May 12, 2008

Tomorrow (the 13th of May, 2008), all 300 families of the Delft-Symphony Anti-Eviction Campaign will be going tomorrow to the Cape Town Civic Centre. The pavement dwellers will be coming to Town with the purpose of personally delivering handwritten letters indicating our wishes to Mayor Helen Zille.

We are upset because our opinions and needs are being ignored by the city. The letters will, amongst other things, demand a change in the way the city treats its poor. We demand to be treated as citizens of this country and to be respected as equal human beings by city officials.

We invite the press to join us at the Civic Centre tomorrow morning to find out the details of our grievances and support us in holding the city accountable to the South African Constitution.

For comment, please call Auntie Jane at 078-403-1302 and Jerome at 083-541-6622.

‘Housing runs out of land’

Source: The Times

Housing delivery has ground to a halt in certain parts of South Africa — all because of a bitter tug-of-war over municipal land.

Despite a massive housing backlog of more than two million units, municipalities are holding on to millions of hectares of prime commonage land — which is supposed to be used to assist local residents — or have already sold it to private developers despite a countrywide moratorium on such land sales, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has told Business Times in an exclusive interview.

Sisulu said that tens of thousands of hectares suitable for affordable housing may have been lost this way, a problem caused largely by a combination of soaring land values and dwindling council revenues. And in many cases the municipalities are selling the land under dubious circumstances.

Huge tracts of land in rural municipalities are also lying idle due to unresolved land claims, she said.

The situation has prompted urgent talks between the departments of housing, land affairs, public works and the Treasury, with several key legislative changes in the pipeline to stop the municipal land grab — and to bring maverick officials into line. “Somehow the state has tied itself up into so many binds that it is unable to move with the speed with which it should move,” Sisulu said.

Commonage land was granted to municipalities decades ago free of charge subject to stringent title-deed conditions for use for local residents.

In a frank appraisal of national housing delivery, Sisulu listed several other major obstacles which include:

# There is still no complete public land asset register, which means the three spheres of government do not know how much land they have and may be available for housing or land reform;

# Housing costs have rocketed due to the high price of cement and steel caused by the ongoing construction of the country’s 2010 World Cup soccer stadiums;

# Massive areas of municipal commonage in Limpopo are tied up in land claims now before the Land Claims Commission; and

# Parastatals such as Transnet are sitting on vast tracts of land that cannot be transferred to the housing department because of legal complications.

Joburg: Activist bashed to death

By Len Kumalo
08 May 2008

Source: Sowetan

Grieving: Maria Sikhosana holding a picture of her deceased son Jan Matshobe. Photo: Len Kumalo

Residents claim cops are culprits

The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) is investigating a case in which a Sebokeng resident and community activist was allegedly beaten to death by police.

This follows accusations by the community that Jan Matshobe, 27, whose body was found on Thursday morning last week in an open veld in Zone 20, was allegedly beaten with golf clubs and batons by a number of police officers.

The incident followed a protest in the area where residents were demanding a response to a memorandum handed to the Emfuleni local municipality for better service delivery on March 10.

Matshobe was one of the activists who was very vocal against poor service delivery. One of the Tuesday’s march organisers, Patrick Sindane said Matshobe was assaulted in full view of fellow protesters.

Sindane alleged that Matshobe was arrested after the beating but was later released. He saw a doctor on Wednesday morning.

“He was rearrested in the evening and was last seen alive with the arresting officers. The same officers were the ones who discovered his lifeless body the following day,” said Sindane.

Several other residents who were also arrested claimed they witnessed the alleged beating.  Police spokesman Captain Keke Motsiri said they were probing a case of murder. He said the matter had been referred to the ICD directorate.

Gugulethu AEC to hold mass march tomorrow (8th May)

Press Statement: G U G U L E T H U A N T I – E V I C T I O N C A M P A I G N

Wednesday 7th May 2008

12 noon

On Thursday 8th May 2008, at 11am, thousands of Gugulethu Backyard Dwellers will march on the Fezeka Municipality Offices.

The march will depart from the Gugulethu Sports Complex. Residents of surrounding areas, from as far away as Khayelitsha, will also join the march.

The Anti-Eviction Campaign has been conducting a campaign for months now involving pressuring all city and provincial authorities to provide houses for those, especially pensioners, who have “red cards” indicating that they have been on the housing waiting list for between 15 and 30 years.

Premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, and MEC for Local Government and Housing, Richard Dyantyi, have consistently refused invitations by the residents to their mass meetings, which are held every Sunday at 2pm.

Instead, evictions of pensioners have continued in all the areas and the Anti-Eviction Campaign with the community has resisted these by reinstating evicted people back in their homes.

“ZONKE i-BACKYARDS zine march eya Efezeka municipality”

For further comment, please call Vukile 078 5942695 or Mncedisi 078 5808646

‘The world cup will be our chance to make our voices heard’

South Africa will host the World Cup in 2010 so construction – and corruption – is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity. These inequalities could be a major issue in the 2009 presidential election.

By Philippe Rivière

“All people shall have the right to live where they choose,
be decently housed, and to bring up their families
in comfort and security.”

(Article 9 of the Freedom Charter adopted
by the Congress of the People at Kliptown
on 26 June 1955.)

There’s a house for sale for $125 just two kilometres from the beach at False Bay, in Khayelitsha, a township east of Cape Town, between Table Mountain and the Cape of Good Hope. The downside is that it is in the QQ section, an informal settlement on marshy land beneath the high-tension cables of Eskom, South Africa’s public electricity utility. Despite a ban, the area is covered with wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofs, the homes of hundreds of thousands of urban poor.

More than 20 years after QQ was squatted, its 600 families still have no sanitation and rely on eight taps for drinking water. An anarchic tangle of electricity cables, hidden beneath tarmac, connects the shantytown to metered supplies in the adjoining legal settlement. Fatal fires are frequent. Anything that can be let out is for hire, even a key to the latrines. Not far from Mzonke Poni’s home, a branch from the main supply cable is concealed in a corner, behind a pile of boxes: he has lived in QQ with his mother for more than six years and hopes to avoid being cut off during the next police raid.

“We’ve got our own Waterfront,” says Poni. QQ has appropriated the name of Cape Town’s smart district because, for four months of the year, winter rains flood all the shacks on low ground. Some residents have raised the soil by a few centimetres to buy themselves enough time to move chairs, television and personal effects to the home of a neighbour or family member.

Jo’burg Taken to Court on Housing for the Poor - Again

Johannesburg, 6 May 2008

Centre for Applied Legal Studies

On Wednesday 7 May 2008, the Johannesburg High Court will hear an application by 88 desperately poor men women and children for an order requiring the City of Johannesburg to say what it will do to provide them with housing if they are evicted from their homes by a private property developer.