Secrecy shrouds Blikkiesdorp relocation plans

For the Right2Know campaign, the community’s struggle for answers about their future indicates that the problem of government secrecy can extend to even the most basic information.

Blikkiesdorp, built by the City in 2007, currently houses about 1600 people.

Willy Heyn and his family moved to Blikkiesdorp, a municipal built Temporary Relocation Area in Delft, in 2009. Heyn had never been to Delft before then; he had lived in Salt River all his life. When they were evicted from their flat in Gympie Street, ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, they had little option but to accept council’s offer of a “temporary” shack to live in.

“We moved to Blikkiesdorp with high hopes of getting a house within a few months,” he says.

“That is how [then Mayor] Dan Plato explained it to us. That, if we moved, we would be prioritised for housing. It has been five years and those dreams have been dashed. Now we do the best that we can to make Blikkiesdorp safe and liveable.”

In November 2009, shortly after the Heyn family’s relocation, Plato was harassed in the community by residents who accused him of lying about when they would receive better housing.

Now that Cape Town International Airport will be extended to the boundary of Blikkiesdorp and an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is in the final phase, the debate about the community’s future has resurfaced.

A final scoping report for the airport’s “runway realignment” project was published in June. It outlined a number of concerns from communities surrounding the airport such as an increase in noise, air and possibly groundwater pollution. Specialists are busy with an environmental assessment which the airport’s consultants will use as a basis for a draft EIA report to be published in November.

SRK Consulting, contracted by ACSA, have said that the relocation of three informal settlements on the fringe of the enlarged airport, Blikkiesdorp, Malawi Camp and Freedom Farm, fall outside the airport extension and runway realignment scope of work. Relocation would take place in terms of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City and ACSA, reads the scoping report.

News that such a documented agreement exists has prompted Heyn to demand clarity about Blikkiesdorp’s relocation.

With the help of Alison Tilley at the Right2Know campaign, the community has put a number of requests to the City for access to the MOU — all of which have been unsuccessful. In response to a query by GroundUp, both ACSA and the City confirmed the MOU.

“The MOU is a broad framework that identifies sites to be relocated, including Blikkiesdorp. It also outlines roles and responsibilities and obligations of the parties, including land parcels to be developed,” wrote Siyabulela Mamkeli, Mayco member for Human Settlements, in an email response.

He added that a time frame for the proposed relocation of the community cannot be given.

A follow up query to Mamkeli, asking whether the MOU was in documented form and how access to it could be obtained, went unanswered. The R2K has had a similar experience, said Tilley.

“R2K has found that we don’t need a secrecy bill to make getting the most basic information about issues that affect our lives really hard,” she said.

“Rumours and conjecture are all the community have to go on, while policy processes go on around them that they are not part of. We need fair process, full information, and free participation. The City has to fish or cut bait – let people stay where they are and upgrade, or tell them where they are going.”

In lieu of relocation, Heyn agrees that there is a “desperate” need for the City to do more to help uplift Blikkiesdorp through providing skills development, job opportunities, a mobile clinic and greater commitment to improving community safety.

“Many people lost their jobs when they were moved here, so there is a lot of poverty, crime and drug abuse,” he said, adding that the community had to organise among themselves “block by block” to do vigilante patrols at night. Shifts in lanes of H-block, where Heyn lives, run on four-hour cycles between sunset and sunrise.

However, Sharon Jones, SRK’s lead consultant on the runway realignment project, claims that an extensive public consultation process preceded the drafting of the scoping report and that another one would be done in compiling the EIA report.

Anyone wishing to register as a stakeholder on the project database and to be informed of the availability of the EIA Report for public comment and the Public Open days should contact Scott Masson of SRK on 021 659 3060 or smasson [at] srk.co.za.

Any comments on the proposed runway realignment can also be submitted to Masson.