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Many people reading about the recently reported case of NedBank unlawfully buying a house, adding it to its portfolio, for R100, will believe this matter to be a freak, a one-off. Sadly, this is not the case, this kind of illegal behaviour has been normal practice for many years by the four major banks in South Africa, not only NedBank, but also ABSA, Standard Bank and FNB.

Bank robbery in South Africa is predominantly not robbery of the banks, but robbery by the banks.

Lungelo Lethu Human Rights Foundation (LLHRF) was formed in 2014 to fight illegal evictions and property fraud which has robbed hundreds of thousands of South Africans of their property and life-savings leaving many destitute.

In South Africa, if a desperate young man grabs your cell phone in the street and is caught, he will go to prison. But if a rich banker, working in collusion with fraudulent property developers and corrupt police officers and officials in the judicial system, steals your house and has you evicted and humiliated in front of your neighbours, the worst that can happen to him is that after years of litigation he may, if he is unlucky, be forced to return your house.

Sad to say, most of these evictions have been carried out through fraudulent use of the courts which have ignored the provision of the law as written and in violation of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

From 2016, LLHRF has been putting together a Class Action against these banks. We now have a mountain of documentary evidence and more than 1000 people who have joined the Class Action. These include cases where people over the age of 70 have been sent to prison for ‘trespass’ for living in property which they believed they owned.

Recently the National Credit Regulator (NCR), took Lungelo Lethu to court because we had managed to obtain documents which incriminate the banks but which the NCR was hiding. The NCR lost the case. It is now clear that the people in control of the NCR are trying to protect the banks from public anger.

We are now waiting for a court date. The Class Action against the banks is for R60 billion. It will be the biggest civil action in South African history.

We have been working for the past 8 years on a zero budget. No one wants to fund us against the super-rich. Some media organisations do not want to publish news about what we are doing, yet we have stopped many evictions. And we have received death threats for doing that.

We ask the South African public for support for our Class Action.

Further to that, we seek for regulation of the financial sector, the abolition of remaining apartheid laws, in particular the Trespass Act, and the creation of a justice system in line with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, one which is equally available to all who live in this country, however poor.

Issued by SACP