Councillor IT Makaba has dismissed allegations that she verbally insults residents and tampered with the housing list in ward 6, Forestdale. Forestdale residents who called for her to step down as their councillor made the allegations at a march last week.
However, Councillor Makaba described the march as ‘a handful of friends and relatives of the old housing committee’.
“At a meeting on April 21 with the Department of Human Settlements that the old committee is to be dissolved and a new three-member committee was elected on May 25,” she told the Courier.

These three members were to liase with the other housing committee members from Dlamini Village and Craigside to form one committee.

This is a special project by the KwaZulu-Natal MEC for Human Settlements, Ravi Pillay. Councillor Makaba said “this angered the old committee, as they would no longer be able to continue with their fraud’.

She alleged that the ‘old list included members of the committee who registered themselves and their husbands for different houses and used other people’s addresses that are actually vacant plots’.

Erika Lawson, who was a member of the old committee and the only one chosen to serve on the new committee, explained that she had scrutinised the list and found that ‘many deserving people – who have been staying for over 10 years – in Forestdale yet their names are not on the list’.
“This list favours only certain individuals whose names and that of their children appear more than once on the list and yet deserving people are sidelined,” Erika said.

Councillor Makaba said that this is not only about the dismissal of the committee, but its individuals who ‘are pushing their agenda and using the members of the community to cause conflict’.