October 10, 2003
By Lucille Davie
SOME R50-million has been paid out in compensation claims to residents of Alexandra since December 1998. Claimants received a final amount of R50 000 for their plots and houses, based on municipal evaluations for the land.
The closing date for applications was 31 December 1998, and by that date, 1 585 applications had been received by the national Department of Land Affairs. More than 1 000 applications have so far been processed, and around 300 applications are still outstanding, classified as "problem cases", where in some cases there is more than one claim to a property, or claimants can't produce original ownership documents.
The department estimates that around 2 600 previous owners were entitled to submit applications, but just over half of that number were received.
As in the case of Sophiatown, where people were paid R40 000 for their expropriated properties, some residents of Alex are not happy with the compensation payments.
Augusta Nthombeni, 78, feels that the R50 000 was like receiving 50c. An amount of R100 000 would have been a fairer figure. In the late 1970s, the house that her parents had bought in the 1950s was expropriated by the authorities.
She received her R50 000 in 2001 and within three months it was spent. She paid R20 000 on her home bond of R36 000, and she caught up payments of school fees for her niece's twins who stay with her. She put tombstones on the graves of her father, mother and grandmother, a long-treasured wish.
Nthombeni found that the only way to get her cheque from the Pretoria office of the Land Affairs Department was to "not give them any rest - I used to phone them, then go to Pretoria, then phone them again, until finally they phoned to tell me to come and collect my cheque".
Another Alexandra resident, Pauline Mkalipe, is also unhappy with the amount she received. "The amount is just not true compensation - we have been short-changed."
But Mkalipe has a broader complaint. She wants to be given back the plot and house in which she was born and brought up by her grandparents. The house is still intact. When it was expropriated in the 1970s she moved to Diepkloof in Soweto but moved back to Alex in 1976 when Soweto exploded with student riots.
Mkalipe sites a case in which, she has been told, residents from a township called Lady Selborne near Pretoria are being resettled on their original plots. This may not necessarily be true. Residents, who, as in Alex, were allowed to own property in Lady Selborne, were gradually removed from their properties and by 1973 the process was complete. The suburb became the white suburb of Suiderberg, similar to the present Triomf, which was previously the cosmopolitan suburb of Sophiatown. Land claims are being dealt with at present in Lady Selborne.
Mkalipe is a professional - she qualified as a social specialist and worked for the Development Bank until 1999. A social specialist is a person who facilitates community meetings between the bank, the community, and the local council, where a loan has been supplied and it has to be decided what the first priorities are in spending the money.
She realises the value of property and people owning their own property and the pride that comes along with that. She reckons that if there were more homeowners in Alex there'd be no squatter camps, there'll be law and order and clean streets.
Mkalipe owns a house in Graskop, Mpumalanga, and her house in Alex. She plans to leave a house to each of her two children.
Still another woman, Florence Zungu, was never resettled and lives in the house in which she was born. The house was expropriated in 1976 by the West Rand Administration Board.
She has received her R50 000 but feels that she has been left in the lurch.
From 1976, owners suddenly became tenants, paying service charges to the council to continue living in their houses. In 1988 the properties were available for re-purchase. Along the way the property had been sub-divided and another house was erected on the site. When the re-purchase was announced a conflict developed between Zungu and the other owner, both trying to buy the other's property.
The sale was halted. The other owner has subsequently moved to Eastgate, says Zungu, and is renting his Alex house. But in the meantime the property is still owned by the council.
Zungu says she wants to make improvements to her house but, as the house does not belong to her, she feels compelled to wait.
She hasn't spent the R50 000 yet, and feels some anger at the process. "The future is so bleak." She consulted a lawyer on taking the money and he said: "If you don't take the money, where do we stand?" So she took the money.
Zungu says there are many other people in Alex who are in the same boat as her. She's keen to collect 50 names to present to the authorities. She wants to write directly to the Minister of Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, and the Land Claims Commission, but says, at 76, she doesn't have the energy to see this through.
The Gauteng Land Claims Commissioner was not available for comment.
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