IOL: De Lille dodges backyarders meeting

06 Sep 2011 – IOL

De Lille dodges backyarders meeting

Landless peoples’ group Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) has accused Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille of running away from a meeting with “backyarders” in Khayelitsha on Tuesday.

The group said it had mobilised the “backyarders” in the township, and many were excited to meet De Lille.

The City of Cape Town however cancelled the meeting at the last minute out of fear for De Lille’s safety.

“People gathered outside the AbM office in Khayelitsha this morning,” the group said in a statement.

The City of Cape Town has created this war in Blikkiesdorp

29 July 2011
Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign Press Release

We warned the City.
We warned the courts.
We warned the public.
Fearing for our lives and with a heavy heart, we write this to tell Zille, Plato and de Lille and say: We told you so!

Yesterday, the morning of the 28^th of July, Blikkiesdorp exploded into a full-scale drug war.

This is what we warned the government against when we resisted our eviction to Blikkiesdorp from the pavement of Symphony Way. The shacks we built ourselves were better than the shacks that our City has built and dumped us in.

We, as residents of this camp, have no control here because the City has disempowered us and stood by while drug-dealers have invaded the ‘temporary’ relocation area.

Yesterday morning, two adults were shot in broad daylight by three gunmen. Yesterday evening, a revenge shooting took place and three more people were shot and are now in hospital. One of those shot was a teenage boy, a member of the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers. Some people have been arrested but all the residents of Blikkiesdorp know that this is only the beginning as revenge killings are likely to continue in the weeks to come.

Media: ‘Shack here please’

Jul 13, 2011 | Peter Dlamini | Sowetan

DA council orders man to raze his brick house in squatter area

THE City of Cape Town says a man who built a brick house in an informal settlement must tear it down because it is a safety hazard.

Though the city has no intention of demolishing any of the shacks in the West Beach informal settlement in Cape Town’s Du Noon, they have given Dayi Mondreki, 48, until today to tear down his house or else they will demolish it.

Mondreki was lauded by his neighbours for building a better home for his four children after living for 11 years in a rickety shack.

But the city’s anti-land invasion unit head Stephen Hayward confirmed that the city had served Mondreki with a notice to demolish his house.

The yearly rains return and re-flood informal settlements and backyards

2 June 2011 – Gugulethu AEC Press Statement

While disaster relief is nowhere to be seen in communities like Thambo Square which has been flooded for days now, the real culprit is that service delivery is non-existent in our communities. Interviews with residents show that this is a chronic problem caused by the City’s top-down approach to development.

There are hundreds of thousands of shackdwellers and backyarders in Cape Town and nearly all of them suffer from the extreme weather on the Cape Flats. Many people, especially children and the elderly, become sick from the cold, the wind and the rain. Their homes are flooded every single winter destroying all their furniture and displacing families for weeks on end.

In the Western Cape, most informal dwellers do not get any assistance from NGOs or the government. This past week, the rains, which barely have an impact in wealthy areas like Camps Bay and Bishops Court, have wrecked havoc on shackdwellers and backyarders alike. And despite requests from victims, the City of Cape Town and the provincial government has refused to provide emergency and medical assistance. In Tambo Square, no alternative accomodation has been provided and so residents remain in their flooded homes. No blankets or hot soup or electricity generators where provided as the elections are well over and politicians think that the poor will forget that government did nothing for them once the next elections come around.

The ANC’s fast and furious parliamentary deliberation over the Info Bill, going through the motions

In the face of sustained opposition to the Protection of Information Bill (better known as the “protection of information from investigative journalism bill”), the ANC is pushing the speedometer needle well into the danger zone as it chases deadlines at breakneck speed. But the question remains: Will it swap its Ferrari for its trusted bulldozer in the end anyway? By T O MOLEFE.

Operating under obvious pressure from above, ANC MPs grew increasingly agitated during Tuesday’s meeting of the ad hoc committee on the Protection of Information Bill. The source of their annoyance was the slow progress on deliberating clauses in the bill, and accused DA and ACDP MPs of intentionally delaying progress.

The big job that awaits new mayor

May 9 2011 at 11:15am – IOL – CLAYTON BARNES

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Blikkiesdorp residents say they won’t vote in next week’s elections because their living conditions havent changed despite promises made by politicians in election campaigns in previous years.

Solidarity: Urgent Press Statement on the Right to the City Campaign – 1 Day to go

Urgent Press Statement

The Right to the City Campaign

Count Down

10 June 2010

Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape, 21 days ago launched it’s campaign ‘the right to the city campaign’ today the world and South Africans are counting few days before the kick off of the 2010 FiFa World cup, also Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape is counting few hours before kick starting it’s campaign.

Part of the aim of the campaign is to build shacks outside Green Point soccer stadium at Cape Town, occupying governmental offices, invading open public spaces within the city and occupying unused hotels, flats and schools within the City.

Tomorrow, the 11^th June 2010 is the first day of our campaign, about 100 members of Abahlali baseMjondolo will meet at Cape Town next to Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) at Keizerngracht Street at 10:00 from there we will proceed to where our protest is going to take place.

Press: Kicked Out for the Cup?

Watch Christopher Werth’s multimedia report from South Africa: “Out of Bounds? Cape Town’s Cleanup for the World Cup.”

Kicked Out for the Cup?

South Africa is accused of clearing Cape Town slums to clean up for the big event

Newsweek Magazine, 4 June 2010

by Christhoper Werth

Victor Gumbi sits pensively beside a smoldering fire in a newly cleared lot, literally in the shadow of the recently renovated Ellis Park Stadium, one of the many venues where South Africa will host the World Cup football tournament, which kicks off this week. South Africa billed the world’s most popular sporting event as a boon to development that would help lift millions out of poverty, but Gumbi, a 35-year-old day laborer, says things are only getting worse. Not long after South Africa was awarded the tournament, an entire city block in the neighborhood where he lives was slated for destruction as part of a larger urban-regeneration scheme around the stadium, as Johannesburg began preparing for the throngs of tourists expected to come pouring in over the next few weeks. Late last year, the run-down building where Gumbi was squatting was torn down, leaving him in a small, jerry-built shack in the middle of a block of half-demolished houses that local residents have nicknamed “Baghdad.” Now many residents who’d been living in the area’s abandoned buildings for well more than a decade feel they’re being forced out because of the World Cup. “They want to hide us. They don’t want the Europeans seeing the people living here, so they demolished these dirty houses,” says Gumbi, who’s convinced he’ll be removed once and for all before the games actually begin.

Press Release: Families Face Eviction on eve of FIFA World Cup

Press Release: Families Face Eviction on eve of FIFA World Cup
Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

9 June 2010

On the eve of the FIFA World Cup, five families from Newfields Village
in Hanover Park will challenge their eviction from the homes constructed
and managed by Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC)
in Wynberg Magistrates Court at 9h00 on Thursday 10 June 2010. They
will be joined by similarly affected families from across the city.

Between 1994 to 2000, CTCHC, a public-private partnership, built 2 400

Cape Town Community Housing Finally meets its match!

Five families in Newfields Village face their verdict for their evictions on the 10/06/2010 (on the day the opening ceremony of the World Cup 2010 will be held).

Background

In 1994 President Nelson Mandela promised to build one million houses and accordingly the City of Cape Town and the National Housing Finance Company (NHFC) tried to make this dream a reality for the poorest of the poor by forming a Section 21 Company called Cape Town Community Housing Company. Eight years ago CTCHC started to build the worst houses in the history of our country with both latent and patent defects. Accordingly, the residents of the nine villages (Newfields Village, Hanover Park Phase 1, 2 and 3, Luyoloville, East Ridge, Woodridge, Manenberg (Tornado Victims) and Phillipi) went on a rental boycott, had marches to the Company, they occupied their administration office, they handed over numerous memorandums of demands and even occupied the administration building in Tijger Valley. The company changed directorship, because of bad management of fances and the pressure from the different communities. All that the community wants is to honour the original understanding and agreements made that they will get a subsidized houses and pay-off the balance over four years with affordable rental.