Residents want the premier to solve the housing problem
MALIBONGWE RIDGE – Residents submitted the memorandum to the representative of the premier who promised to report back within seven days.
Susan Mahlangu (67) who’ve been staying in Itsoseng informal settlement in Malibongwe Ridge continues to live in squalor.
She claimed she had witnessed people from outside the settlement receiving houses as part of the Malibongwe Ridge Housing Project.
The elderly woman has given up the battle and doesn’t think she will ever get a house from the government. She alleged that politicians continued to promise her a house but nothing was forthcoming. “I will rather die here, my heart is very painful when I think about it,” she said.
Just like Mahlangu, Joel Seakamela who has been staying in the settlement since 2000, said there was no dignity in staying in the informal settlement. “There is no privacy, imagine sharing a shack with a wife and children,” he said.
Residents complained that during the rainy season, their informal homes were flooded, the area didn’t have electricity and they had to collect water from tanks.
“They [politicians] always make false promises especially during the elections and do not deliver,” alleged Seakamela.
Many residents in the area embarked on a brief protest on January 27 to deliver a memorandum of demands to the representative of the Gauteng Premier’s office, Dan Mpofu. The battle for residents to be allocated houses intensified in 2015 when the government allocated 144 units of the completed Malibongwe Ridge Housing Project which had been implemented in 2012.
According to one of the community leaders Nndanganeni Khakhu, 486 houses were built as part of the project but in 2017 people started to occupy 342 units that were not yet allocated to them.
“Government must regulate the project, establish those who qualify for a RDP subsidy, remove those occupants who don’t have a subsidy and allocate the houses to those who were approved to have a subsidy from the informal settlement,” he said.
Some of the residents’ demands included electrification of the completed houses, the data on how many people have applied for house subsidies, and an explanation as to why the project dragged on for more than 10 years when it was scheduled to
be completed in 2017.
Dan Mpofu of the Premier’s office signed the memorandum of demands and said, “I will take the memorandum to the Premier and will report back to the residents within seven days.”
This is a developing story and the Premier’s spokesperson is yet to comment if they had received the memorandum.
The Randburg Sun will publish updates as they happen.
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