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This week, one hundred and thirty-three residents of the Winnie Mandela informal settlement will challenge the Ekurhuleni Municipality’s failure to give them possession of housing constructed with their subsidies in 2004.

The residents are very poor people who live in shacks at the Winnie Mandela informal settlement in Tembisa. Each of the applicants has applied for, and been allocated, a state-subsidised house in the adjacent Winnie Mandela Park township. This was done in terms of the National Housing Code.

The residents first applied for housing subsidies almost 20 years ago, in 1998. By thirteen years ago – in 2004 – all of the applicants’ subsidy applications had been approved. Each of the residents’ subsidies was then used to develop a specific stand on a specific site in Winnie Mandela Park. The National Housing Code requires that these stands should have been transferred to the residents once they were complete.

But these stands were not given to the residents. They were occupied by other people. The municipality cannot say who these people are or how they got there, but it has admitted in court papers that stands can sometimes be misallocated because of fraud or corruption in the housing development process.

This week the residents will ask the Pretoria High Court to correct the wrongful misallocation of their houses by ordering the municipality to provide them with other houses in a nearby development by the end of 2018. The municipality will argue that it should not be ordered to do anything because, it says, it has acted reasonably in the circumstances, and lacks the resources necessary to provide houses to the residents by the end of 2018. This is despite the fact that the municipality was paid the residents’ subsidies as far back as 2004.

The case will be called in Court 6D of the Pretoria High Court tomorrow (23 May 2017) at 10am, when Justice Teffo will indicate when she will hear the parties’ arguments.

Read more about the case here.

Issued by SERI