P. Nkosi writes
People without houses had their hopes raised sky high when they invaded land owned by a Mining Company. It seemed so easy; the whole area from the Old Pretoria road to the Clewer railway line. People and cars filled the open veld. This was nobody’s land and was lying fallow, abandoned by the black top company. It was a done deal with police just watching happy people staking a claim with pegs and string.
On the third day the police backed by something like Saracens military vehicles tore away all those pegs marking the claims. It was all over. Anger and disgust blocked the N4; it was anger taken out on the wrong people being road users. Blaming the road users of N4 is wrong. Blame the government.
Reasons PAC takes a dim view of land invasion are two fold being land invasion creates slums and the PAC is against slum formation. Slums are no place humans should live, but where must they live? A land was invaded by some people who own beautiful houses, with their BMW and 4X4’s, we saw them at the Clewer Outland, also were there to stake a claim, not one stand per person but five to ten stands in order to rent them out or sell them back to the poor. That is greed. The poor always loses and it is always the poor who faces the angry police and the Red Ants.
he Mining Company has now fenced off the invaded land with razor wires. There is no land for many poor people. The Mining Companies have all the land; every piece of fallow land is mining land. It is not farms, parks or shopping centres. There is not much private and state land left lying fallow for grazing animals, hunting, fetching firewood or for jay walking.
All this must be PAC’s fault for sleeping and fiddling while the country was eaten up by corruption and government’s inability to deal with the greedy mining companies. We know that PAC has gone through difficult times, and almost fading from the political scene due to factions, splits. But hey, which party has not gone through splits and factions?
The point is that there would not be any land invasion if the government stood high to its obligations, if it had delivered housing to the people. The mines would not refuse if a demand was made; in the past mines have been building e.g. Reitspruit, Kleinkoppies, hostels etc. Instead of building flats, the government opted for the RDP housing program. RDP housing guzzles up all the land, while flats save a lot of land. To this day the municipality refuses to build flats that could bridge Lynnville township and the town, Pap n Vleis, Klarinet and town, Pap n Vleis and Coronation.
21 years of democratic power is a long time; the PAC shall no longer countenance the excuse of blaming apartheid or white people for the failure of the government to provide decent housing within walking distance to town. The government is in charge
