Alpoa to brief members on land and title deeds restoration

The Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association (Alpoa) will hold a general meeting on 16 June to brief members on the latest

developments in their quest to have their land and property rights restored.

Read: Alpoa pins hopes on new City administration to restore deeds

The meeting, to be held at the Roman Catholic Church Hall at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Rev Sam Buti Street, will be a feedback session for members on the developments since the new Democratic Alliance administration of the City of Johannesburg took office in 2016.

The Executive Mayor Herman Mashaba-led administration had promised to speedily look into the matter and find ways of solving it ‘once for all’ but fears are growing that this might not be the case any time soon as the administration is battling a lot of other frontiers.

Another thorny issue the Alpoa meeting will deliberate about is the on-and-off Alexandra Re-Development Summit, which was spearheaded by the former ANC-led administration of Mayor Mpho Parks Tau, believed to have died at infancy as nothing but a proposal.

Jacky Segopa, secretary general of Alpoa, called on members of the association to come in their numbers to the meeting to hear first-hand what the developments on the issue of the transfer of properties to their rightful owners are.

Read: Alpoa stalwart dies

Alex residents bought plots from the then-farm owner Herbert Papenfus in 1912 and developed the first black-owned urban settlement in the country, but with the rise of the apartheid regime in 1948, the government sought to strip blacks of ownership of land and property rights in urban settlements and usurped their land rights and title deeds in the 1970s.

Alpoa, which had been running Alexandra as an independent settlement since its inception, then turned its energies to fighting the new battle on its hands, that of land and property rights restorations.