15 June 2026
The Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg has ordered the City of Ekhurhuleni to rebuild the N12/Albert Luthuli informal settlement in Benoni. Illustration: Lisa Nelson
The Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg has ordered the City of Ekhurhuleni to allow hundreds of families to return to the N12 informal settlement in Benoni.
Between 6 and 15 May, residents watched in horror as their homes were torn down as part of Operation Prosper, while South African National Defence Force soldiers looked on. The operation was meant to rid the settlement of illegal miners.
Some of the residents were part of 800 families the City of Ekhurhuleni had evicted from land in Bapsfontein, about 20km away in 2011. The Constitutional Court had declared that the eviction was unlawful and ordered that the families be temporarily settled at N12 also known as Albert Luthuli informal settlement.
Permanent housing was supposed to be provided, but never materialised.
The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has now obtained an interim court order against the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, directing that 570 people and their families be allowed to return to the settlement. The municipality must provide them with temporary structures by the end of the month.
Johannesburg High Court Judge Stuart Wilson heard the urgent application on 12 June and granted the residents immediate relief. He handed down his reasons over the weekend.
He said the City had failed for 15 years to provide the permanent accommodation ordered by the apex court.
“The least the occupiers could have expected was that they would be allowed to live at the N12 settlement with a degree of tenure security, safe from the kind of violent action that triggered their relocation,” he said.
There was no court order permitting the eviction in May, he said. The City had apparently acted on the authority of a Presidential proclamation, “Operation Prosper”, which gave authority to 550 SANDF soldiers to be deployed in Gauteng to prevent and combat crime, ostensibly to locate and arrest illegal miners.
That proclamation stated that the soldiers were to return to barracks no later than the end of April. “This begs the question, what were soldiers doing at the settlement in May?” wrote Wilson.
The City said it was participating in a “crime-fighting operation” directed at illegal miners, and not an eviction. Most of the original residents no longer lived there, the City said.
But Wilson said the City had not been able to justify the wholesale demolition of the settlement and the eviction of its residents.
The City’s lawyers had been unable to point to anything “which authorises the police, acting without a court order, to summarily destroy any physical structure simply because it is a site of illegal activity”, he said.
A City document showed that the original, legal settlers would only be verified after the operation, during which virtually the entire settlement was destroyed.
According to the SAHRC, some 2,000 people and their families had been left homeless.
Jane Mmabatho had lived there for 15 years after being relocated from Bapsfontein. Her home was destroyed, with her furniture still in it. Her most important documents, including those confirming her relocation, had been lost.
71-year-old Ceroline Mphuthi told a similar story, saying she now “sleeps outside”.
In an affidavit, SAHRC legal officer David Mtshali, who visited the settlement on 8 May, said he saw “distraught residents trying to salvage whatever remained”. He said they had no shelter.
Wilson said that photographs “depicted obviously well-tended flower beds and gardens arranged around empty spaces or rubble”.
The respondents, he said, did not place any of these facts in serious dispute. And it did not put up any eyewitness accounts of what happened.
Wilson said the interim interdict prevented further demolitions but did not prevent the police or even the army from entering the settlement and seizing illegal mining equipment or from arresting illegal miners.
It only prevented the demolition of structures used as dwellings, whether by illegal miners or otherwise.
He also rejected the City’s submission that reconstruction could not take place because the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development had declared the land unfit for occupation, given that “the settlement was inhabited with the municipality’s consent for 15 years”.
Wilson said he would continue to supervise the case because “on the face of things”, the respondents had committed a series of flagrant violations of rights and may well be in contempt of the Constitutional Court’s 2011 ruling.
He ordered that the City manager and mayor be personally responsible for complying with his order and that they must report back to the court by mid-July on progress. They and the municipality were ordered to pay the costs of the application for interim relief.
