The Cosmo City Residents Association (CCRA) has called on residents to stop discrimination within the community, warning that internal divisions are harming social unity and undermining the goals of the area’s integrated development.

CCRA president Buchule Raba-Mpinga said the association is deeply concerned about the ongoing exclusion of residents who were not part of the former Sgodiphola informal settlement.

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According to the CCRA, people who did not come from Sgodiphola are still being treated as outsiders. Raba-Mpinga said it is troubling that some residents are ‘shut out of local opportunities and unfairly interrogated about their ‘bloodline’ before their right to participate or even receive help during danger is acknowledged’.

The association stressed that Cosmo City was never intended to continue the identity of a single settlement. “Cosmo City was never meant to be a continuation of one settlement’s past,” the statement read. “This development welcomed residents from several informal settlements across Gauteng and Johannesburg, not Sgodiphola alone. Cosmo City exists today because multiple communities were integrated, uplifted, and given a new start together.”

Despite this vision, tensions have continued between bonded-house residents and those living in RDP units or rental flats. The CCRA pointed to a harmful belief that only Sgodiphola-origin residents are the ‘real’ Cosmo City community. The association said this mindset is ‘not only false, but destructive’.

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Raba-Mpinga also criticised the behaviour of residents who discriminate against fellow South Africans while ‘struggling to hold accountable the illegal foreign nationals who operate freely in the township and the violent panga-related school gangs causing chaos under their watch’.

The statement also highlighted the role of tenants in sustaining the local economy, saying, “Benefiting from renters while simultaneously mistreating them is both contradictory and unjust.”

The CCRA warned that excluding people from community projects and leadership spaces because of their background goes against the values of dignity and fairness. “It is unacceptable that residents without Sgodiphola origins are being shut out… as if their contribution does not matter.”

Raba-Mpinga urged the community to reflect on its direction, asking: “What kind of community are we building? A united one, or one breaking apart from within?”

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