Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

13 November 2007

Source: Peoples Post

THE Anti-Eviction campaign strongly condemns the call for tenders by the City Council for contracts to demolish informal settlements (“City calls on bidders to demolish shacks”, People’s Post, 23 October). Apparently successful contractors have to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to perform evictions and demolitions of informal settlements.

Evictions, in the middle of the night, any day of the week, potentially even on Christmas day and other holidays, are set to become the norm.

This is worse than the Apartheid state. According to the tender meeting held on 24 October, squads must be a minimum size of 10 and contractors were warned to not “under-tender” – in other words, the City Council is set to spend millions on demolishing informal settlements instead of using these funds to build houses for the people.
Communities are still waiting for the City Council plan for 200 informal settlements to receive housing. Now it is clear that no such plan exists; rather what does face communities in informal settlements is the prospect of being thrown out onto the street. These mercenary squads are soon to operate across the entire Cape metropole.
Thus we can now see what the commitment of the DA and its alliance partners, the ID and others mean by a housing plan – they want to remove informal settlements and claim “progress”. There is a direct link between the threatened evictions and the further privatisation of housing provision by the banks. In other words, the City Council and all the parties represented therein are nothing else but the agents of the banks. Some of these parties sit on the boards of the banks while several of them receive donations from them.

Already from the 600 bond houses to be built at Joe Slovo, FNB will make over R100?million in clear profit at the expense of dumping thousands of people into starvation and homelessness at the ends of the city.

The Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) condemns the privatisation of public housing and land and calls on all communities to resist the evictions.

A simple solution to the existence of informal settlements is the provision of mass housing close to places of work! The setting up of mercenary demolition squads shows the hypocrisy of the idea of a “winning nation” – the only ones who are winning are the banks and big construction companies. The state spends billions on soccer stadiums but is not prepared to even match this amount on housing for the poor.

The AntiWar Coalition supports the call of the AEC and will be mobilising in support of resistance to evictions.