A group of Reiger Park residents shut down their township, blocking all entrances with burning tyres and rocks on November 26.
The newly-formed Reiger Park Community Forum’s spokesperson Jonathan Schoeman says they have decided to take their issues to the streets following countless meetings with authorities to persuade them to attend to their issues.
A representative of the office of the major was reportedly deployed to the township to accept the memorandum on Monday, and Schoeman threatened to take to the streets again should the municipality fails to act on the residents’ demands.
According to Schoeman, the latest protest served as a follow-up demonstration to the several recent protests about service delivery issues, including cable theft, illegal electricity connections, lack of development, drug trade and irregularities regarding ongoing projects.
They feel that since the new government took over, the country’s coloured communities have been marginalised.
“We want the government to take our issues seriously because we have previously sent a number of memoranda and no one has acted on our issues.
“We asked the government to investigate the highly questionable appointment of community liaison officers for the ongoing projects in our township, including the Leeuwpoort Housing Development. But nothing has happened,” said Schoeman.
Schoeman also blamed the drug scourge in the township on the high unemployment rate, saying unemployed residents resorted to dealing and using drugs out of desperation.
He said the community wants a guarantee that 100 per cent of the houses being built in the area will be allocated to the “indigenous community of Reiger Park”, which he said in his understanding of the history of the township, the community he is referring to exclude Ramaphosa, Joe Slovo and Kalamazoo informal settlements.
In a bid to stop the cable and electricity thefts which resulted in constant power outages in the area, the community recently took matters into their own hands and disconnected all the illegal connections.
This action, however, led to violent clashes with the residents of the nearby Joe Slovo informal settlement, believed to be the perpetrators of illegal electricity connections and cable theft.
Guardroom
The theft prompted the community to erect a guardroom in one of the most affected areas and is used by volunteers who take turns patrolling the power line.
In a video clip shared on Facebook, the municipality seems to be against the initiative.
A government official can be heard in the video clip talking over the phone telling the community their shack is illegal and that the community was instructed to remove it because failure to do so would result in the metro removing it for them.
The clip also shows members of the EMPD who was reportedly sent to the site to evict the volunteers and their guardroom.
The community apparently failed to seek permission before erecting the structure on the construction site. Members of the community saw this as an unfair decision, accusing the local government of employing double standards in dealing with illegally built structures in the vicinity of the development site.
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