Anxious wait continues for District Six claimants as minister Nkoana-Mashabane appears before Land Claims Court

The 1,078 District Six claimants continue to wait to hear if the department of Rural Development and Land Reform has met its required three-month deadline on plans to redevelop Cape Town’s historic District Six — their home.

But before that could happen, the department’s minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, faced the Land Claims Court to answer why she should not be held personally responsible for the slow progress in returning claimants to the land they were removed from under the apartheid Group Areas Act.

At the time, Judge Kollapen ruled that the minister needed to come up with a holistic plan with specific timelines, a conceptual layout for the creation of housing units, a specific budget breakdown and time frames on when restitution would be completed.

But on Friday, almost eight days before the next three-month mandated court update, Nkoana-Mashabane was grilled extensively for nearly the entire day by Geoff Budlender SC, from Norton Rose Fulbright, the law firm taking on the case on behalf of the District Six Working Committee.

Budlender asked tough questions, including if Nkoana-Mashabane, as minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, should be personally responsible for this backlog, where the money would come from to rebuild District Six and why it should take so long for families to be rehoused in the area, if her department’s role was to fix the injustice of past dispossession.

But Nkoana-Mashabane consistently either did not answer or skirted around questions. At one point there was a silence of about two minutes when Budlender asked the minister if there had been “an attempt to comply”.

Eventually, Nkoana-Mashabane admitted that she had not complied fully with the court’s order — which caused the courtroom, full of claimants, to quieten to a whisper.

The minister said then that her department hoped to have a full plan drafted by August 2019.

Acting Judge Tembeka Ngcukaitobi did not mince his words with the minister:

“The fact of the matter is, it is 20 years delayed,” he said, referring to the number of years people from District Six have waited for restitution in the area where they grew up.

Judge Ngcukaitobi told the courtroom that if the 1,078 land claims were resolved, it could wipe out one-fifth of all land claims in South Africa. According to Ngcukaitobi, there were about 5,000 outstanding land claims in the country.

He said the District Six claimants, many elderly, “have no clue when they will get their units”, and reminded the minister and court that 13 claimants thus far have died, while waiting for restitution.