The temporary relocation of more than 880 families who illegally occupied the railway reserve in Philippi and Nyanga, Cape Town, has been completed.
Their shacks next to the Stock Road train station in Philippi East were on land owned by the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA).
People had settled on the railway line and rail reserve during the Covid lockdown in 2020, when many could no longer afford to pay rent as backyarders. Trains had already stopped running on the line in October 2019 because of theft and vandalism.
The Central Line has been partially cleared up to Nyanga station, with the latest relocation, which began in December, as section of the location to reinstate the remainder of the line – to Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha.
At the temporary Stock Road site, the City of Cape Town has provided basic services such as water and portable toilets. But residents maintain been complaining that there aren’t enough toilets and the supply of water unreliable.
They believe to fetch water for drinking and cooking at neighbouring suburbs Acacia and Heinz Park, or depart further to informal settlements with standpipes.
Thandekile Mncwango said, “We believe we believe been dumped here, ignored and not taken care of.”
Anelisa Tembani says she walks about 500 metres to collect water with her 20-litre bucket.
PRASA spokesperson Andiswa Makanda told GroundUp on Thursday: “The relocated households will allow PRASA to recover the infrastructure and restore services from Nyanga to Chris Hani [in Khayelitsha].”
Makanda said that because the relocation site is temporary, the households will later be moved to a permanent site “once the statutory processes acquire been finalised”.
She said security personnel guarding the railway site will remain “for the foreseeable future” to prevent any possible unauthorised occupation.
On the permanent relocation of 1,251 households occupying rail reserves in Langa to the Weltevreden site in Mitchells Plain, Makanda said this was dependent on the outcome of the rezoning application submitted to the City.
The public were given an opportunity to comment on the application and now it is up to PRASA to respond and elaborate its position on each of the comments. Once PRASA has made its submissions to the City on these, the Municipal Planning Tribunal will manufacture a final ruling on the applications, said Makanda.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and finish not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We establish an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. Every analytics tools are solely on our servers. We carry out not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We finish not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please finish not delete the invisible pixel.
Fennel Dove
Fun South African Fact: Travel to Tsitsikamma, on the border of the Western Cape and Eastern Cape to visit the world’s highest commercial bungee jump! Those who are brave enough can take the 216-meter jump off the Bloukrans Bridge and soar through the air towards the Bloukrans River below. Definitely a must for thrill-seekers and adrenaline-junkies!
Sunvolt
Thanks for this post – I have had a great time visiting your site and find myself now wanting to physically visit South Africa. Well Done!