Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association members meet
ALEXANDRA – A report-back meeting of Alpoa members will be held at the Roman Catholic Church Hall on 29 September.
Hundreds of members of the Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association (Alpoa) are expected to fill up the 2nd Avenue Roman Catholic Church Hall on 29 September as they anxiously gather to hear the latest on their land and property claims.
This could turn out to be one of their most crucial gatherings and report-back meetings ever, after a group of elderly men and women in their 80s braved the biting cold to go and picket outside Luthuli House in the Jozi CBD to demand a speedy resolution to the land property rights impasse in Alexandra which has been a thorny issue for close to five decades.
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The ‘Alpoa Elders’, as the elderly protesters have since come to be known, handed ANC heavyweights at their headquarters a list of demands after which an official of the Gauteng Human Settlements Department, Sam Mahatlane, committed to meet with Alpoa and Apor [Alexandra Property Owners Rights] and other key stakeholders on 14 August and thereafter hold a public feedback meeting.
Apor is a splinter group from Alpoa but the two organisations have come to an understanding to work together in a bid to find a speedy finalisation to the township’s land and property rights struggle which has been going on since the late 1970s when the apartheid regime usurped those rights in favour of demolishing Alexandra to make way for a hostel-type residential area for migrant labourers.
Although the outcomes of the picket have not been made public as yet, it is understood they form part of the serious debate in the Alpoa meeting as members will want to know what has happened since the undertakings from the Gauteng Human Settlements Department.
READ: Alpoa to brief members on land and title deeds restoration
Another hot potato at the meeting will be a promise made by the new DA-led administration of the City of Johannesburg when it took over power from the ANC that would speed up the restoration of land and property rights, a process which now seems to be dragging its feet.
Alex residents bought stands in the area as early as 1912 when the then farmer in the area, Herbert Papenfus, sold plots of his farm for a township development which he later named Alexandra after his wife.
