Government housing spat goes to ConCourt

Decades after they were approved for government housing – and despite the courts having ordered the state to deliver – 133 men and women living in the Winnie Mandela informal settlement on the East Rand are still in the same shacks they were in then.

And, now, they want a total of more than R15 million in constitutional damages.

The High Court in Pretoria last year dismissed their claim, but today the group is turning to the Constitutional Court in the hopes of getting a second bite at the cherry.

Nomzamo Zondo – from the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI) – is representing them.

In the papers, she explained how many were now in their old age and that some had died waiting on government.

Zondo described how her clients had no access to electricity or adequate sanitation.

“Those conditions should have been alleviated 20 years ago, when the applicants’ RDP housing subsidies were approved and RDP housing units were constructed for them,” she said.

Instead, she said, their homes wound up being “corruptly allocated to other people”.

In 2017, the High Court in Pretoria ordered the Ekurhuleni municipality to provide them with houses by the end of the following year.

On appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), though, it was given a six-month extension.

Just two days before the deadline, the municipality moved for a further extension.

But this not only wound up dismissed, it also prompted the constitutional damages claim: R5,000 per person for every month from that point on that the order went unfulfilled.

That application, too, was dismissed by the high court.

But in their papers, the group’s legal team says it is the only relief left open to remedy “a clear, egregious and ongoing breach of their rights of access to adequate housing, that has stretched out for the better part of two decades”.

“[They] have been unnecessarily required to endure the condition of effective homelessness for the duration of the [municipality’s] refusal to obey the order,” their lawyers said.

The municipality has made alternative offers to accommodate the community but these have largely been rejected as a result of not being in line with what they were promised.

Said head of specialised litigation Selven Davey Frank in the papers, the municipality accepted the community has faced long delays and is members were “at the front of the queue”.

But, he said, the Winnie Mandela informal settlement was, but one of 119 within the municipality.

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