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The city council has been criticized for its land invasion operations, and the South African Human Rights Commission was recently granted an interim injunction from a higher court preventing further evictions during the shutdown, if a court order has not been obtained first.
The city is requesting permission to appeal, and Smith told the committee that the court was wrong by not accepting the city’s evidence.
He said land invasions and backlash when authorities try to intervene are the biggest threat to the city.
“It’s a situation that we see across the country with Buffalo City, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Johannesburg, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town all experiencing very significant increases in land invasions,” he said.
“We have to protect national, provincial, municipal and private lands from illegal occupation and, in this sense, we have to follow the prescriptions of the Law for the Prevention of Illegal Evictions (PIE) and the Law of Unauthorized Occupation of Lands with the customary law recourse for plunder. “
Smith said there have been 147 land invasions since the first week of July, accompanied by 115 protest actions, which resulted in 91 arrests and 46 injured police personnel.
The city claims it had to deal with 60,000 illegal structures erected during the invasions, just under 10,000 of which were illegally occupied and which authorities are now unable to remove because they are protected by the PIE Law.
“Unfortunately, this means that many people who have been waiting for land for formal housing are deprived of those opportunities due to these land invasions,” Smith said.
“There is a R50m project in Khayelitsha that has been lost, some 500 units, due to a land invasion at the Mahama site that we will never recover.”
Smith said protesters in Bloekombos had used sidewalk bricks to create barricades and as weapons against police, and a city hall employee had been injured by a gasoline bomb thrown at him from nearby.
The city said the South African Passenger Rail Agency also lost large tracts of land along its now disused center line at Mfuleni, Philippi, where huts had been built on the tracks.
