Lost belongings after evictions: a chaotic blame game

The residents were evicted early in June 2014 and many of them spent months in the local community hall before being rehoused in Lwandle.

A commission of enquiry chaired by advocate Denzil Potgieter found that the conduct of SANRAL was “unjustifiable” and that it was liable for the consequences of the illegal evictions. Questioned about claims by residents that their possessions were not returned] after the evictions in June 2014 SANRAL spokesman Vusi Mona referred GroundUp to the office of the sheriff responsible for the evictions.

“We are engineers,” he said. “Our mandate is to build roads.”

He said “not a single engineer” had been involved in the evictions or made lists of people’s possessions. “That is not the mandate you South Africans gave SANRAL.”

“We asked law enforcement to do what is expected of them. They must account.”

The office of the sheriff in Strand referred GroundUp to SANRAL’s lawyers, the firm Chennells Albertyn, which said the belongings had been returned in September last year. Community leaders had taken responsibility for the return of the goods and SANRAL could not be held responsible, said Fiona Bester of Chennells Albertyn.

Bester sent GroundUp affidavits from community leader Mpatisi Tshetu dated 17 September 2014 saying that he had gone with a security company on 16 September to collect the belongings from a warehouse in Heritage Park, that he had confirmed that the warehouse was empty, that the material had been offloaded in Lwandle and he had taken possession of it. “I told the community that no item will be handed over until 18h00 for the rest of the community to arrive back from work,” Tshetu states.

He had placed guards to look after the goods and one of the guards had come to him “sometime before 17h00” to tell him that it was difficult to control the community as residents were “taking the stuff by force” and placing it in their homes.

Tshetu said he had told residents that if they had complaints they should not blame anyone “as they have now taken the situation into their own hands.”

Sheldon Magardie is the director of the Cape Town office of the Legal Resources Centre. He says, “Evictions executed by the Sheriff on the instruction of an organ of state must be carried out humanely and with due regard to the obligation to respect and protect the constitutional rights of the persons affected.” He also says, “Execution of an eviction order in a manner which has little regard for people’s possessions and property and the proper storage of materials removed in the course of an eviction, is inconsistent with this obligation.”