The Ekurhuleni Concerned Residents Association (ECRA) and 133 of its members have launched an application in the Pretoria High Court to correct widespread misallocation of state-subsidised housing in Tembisa.

The 133 residents have lived in shacks at Winnie Mandela Park, Tembisa, without sufficient access to basic services since 1994.  Each of the residents was approved and allocated a particular state-subsidised stand, only to find other people living there when they tried to move in. As a result, the residents cannot take possession of the stands allocated to them. By fraud or negligence, those stands have been given to other people, unknown to the residents.

Even though the residents cannot move onto their stands, the municipality is sending them water and electricity bills, and charging them for municipal rates. In addition the Provincial Government will not provide the residents with other stands or houses, because the housing subsidy database records them as already having received a stand. The residents are accordingly marked as “inactive” on the housing subsidy database.

ECRA has made exhaustive attempts to raise these issues with Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements. Unfortunately all these attempts have been unsuccessful. Tsietsi Kukame of ECRA said “We have taken our complaints to all three spheres of government, from the Municipality to the President’s office. We also approached Chapter 9 institutions and parliament itself but no one was interested in resolving our problem. We have ended up at the steps of the court and we hope that justice will prevail.”
According to Nomzamo Zondo, SERI director of litigation, said: “One of our clients, Mr Thubakgale, is an elderly pensioner who is forced to use a hand-dug pit latrine, a stone’s throw away from Africa’s biggest airport, while he watches another person live in the stand the government’s database says should have been given to him. His pain is worsened by the municipality’s demands that he pays for services that he does not receive, with money he does not have. To crown it all, every government department that he has ever approached has agreed that something is horribly wrong, but has done nothing to help.”

The Ekurhuleni Concerned Residents Association and its members are represented by Nomzamo Zondo, director of litigation at SERI.


MEDIA BRIEFING SESSION

Date and time: Wednesday, 03 June 2015at 12:00

Venue: SERI Conference Room, 6th Floor Aspern House, 54 De Korte Street, Braamfontein.

Read the papers and more about the case here.

Contact details:
Nomzamo Zondo, SERI director of litigation: 071 301 9676 / 011 356 5868 /
nomzamo@seri-sa.org

Tsietsi Kukame, Ekurhuleni Concerned Residents Association (ECRA), president:
078 857 8162 / tsietsi.kukame@gmail.com