Shack scam: Langa activist fears for her life

In a desperate bid to find a place for her family live, 26-year-old Portia Mpe and her husband accepted an offer for a site to erect a shack at Langa Temporary Relocation Area (TRA) in January. The couple paid R3,000 to a community leader, hired a bakkie on a Friday morning and moved their furniture and zinc from a backyard settlement in Delft to Langa.

But as they were building the shack, the City of Cape Town’s Law Enforcement arrived. Officers told Mpe that she was there unlawfully and threatened her with eviction if she continued to build. When Mpe led the officers to the man to whom she had paid for the “right” to build, he denied ever having met her.

“He just stood there, looked me squarely in the eyes and said ‘I have never seen this woman in my life’. Man, we got badly scammed,” she says.

Having fallen out with her Delft landlord, Mpe’s family of five now lives cooped up with her sister and brother in-law in a small City-built unit in the TRA. Her building material and furniture still lie scattered about the site for which she paid R3,000.

These scenes were repeated this week when nine households were evicted by Law Enforcement officers from Langa TRA on Sunday and Monday. Nosiyanda Mnyeko, 25, stood by on Monday morning as she watched her building material carted off on the back of a truck. Hours later she was still at the recently cleared site, claiming she had no place to go.

Mnyeko, an unemployed mother of three, was seduced by the offer of a plot at Langa TRA because she could not afford the monthly rent of R400 for a shack in Kosovo informal settlement. But in a single morning she lost the her entire investment in the move: R2,800 for building material, R300 for bakkie hire and R1,500 for the plot. She paid for the plot through an intermediary and does not know where the money ended up.

Activist and TRA resident Cindy Ketani says all payments for plots eventually flow to a community leader and shack selling kingpin (his name is being withheld pending police investigations). Sitting in her municipal shack she recounts years of personal struggle to bring an end to the corrupt sales.

Cindy Ketani has been campaigning to bring an end to illegal shack and plot sales in Langa TRA for a number of years. She faces threats and intimidation. Her house was set alight in the early hours of Wednesday morning last week. Photo by Daneel Knoetze.

Langa TRA was built to accommodate families left homeless by a devastating shack fire in nearby Joe Slovo informal settlement in 2005. Later, people displaced from their shacks to make space for the Joe Slovo N2 Gateway housing development joined those living in the TRA. Residents here are in different stages of applying for, or benefitting from, government housing. And so, says Ketani, some of those who have corruptly moved into TRA units were playing a long game, with the ultimate goal of receiving a government house illegitimately.

“Some of those people who first paid bribes to stay here have already moved into N2 Gateway units. This, while we have many desperate families still living here in overcrowded conditions. They have been waiting patiently for years,” she says.

Resistance to the arrival of outsiders, all of whom apparently paid the kingpin in the racket for a space at the TRA, was organised under the Western Cape banner of shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. (Read the organisation’s 2012 press statement about Langa TRA corruption.)

Ketani and other members of the movement used to form human chains to stop trucks from bringing new arrivals to settle illegally. But she sympathises with those who were duped.

“We have nothing against them, our issue lies with [the corrupt community leader] and the police who refuse to investigate these things properly. Even now, I am fearing for my life. But I carry on because we see daily that poor people are being robbed. They are desperate for a place to stay, so they are easily lied to and exploited,” she says.

“Will I really have to end up in a body bag before Langa police take this matter seriously?”

Cronies of the shack-selling syndicate openly threaten her in the TRA’s dusty alley ways by day. By night, ominous notes are slipped under her doorway and, on Wednesday last week, someone threw a molotov cocktail at her front door. Ketani had to break through her shack’s wall to usher her family to safety, before extinguishing the blaze.

The police are investigating a case of intimidation, but claim that the fraud case opened by the Mpes,was withdrawn by the complainants, a claim that Portia Mpe denies. It does not surprise her, however. She says. Langa police officers laughed her off a number of times when she tried opening the case against the man who defrauded her of R3,000.

“They just said they know [the man] and that he is a good guy. I could not believe it. The cops are as corrupt as those very crooks,” she says.

This year, Ketani enlisted the help of the City’s Mayco member for Safety and Security, JP Smith. But while expressing frustration at the police’s tardiness in investigating, Smith says his hands are tied - Metro Police do not have the same investigative and arresting capacity as the police. Smith suspects that the police have purposefully neglected to investigate the fraud and intimidation properly, because the community leader implicated is politically connected.

GroundUp attempted to contact the community leader accused of being behind the shack selling syndicate. He did not return calls or respond to messages sent to his cellphone.