Pretoria - There needs to be a greater focus on effecting arrests than evicting dwellers, to curb the continuous problem of land invasion in the City of Tshwane.
This is according to MMC for Human Settlements, Kgosietsile Kgosiemang, who yesterday rushed to Mabopane police station to lay criminal charges against land invaders in ward 20, Block D, Mabopane.
He said the private landowner, who is working with the City, obtained a court interdict to prevent illegal invasion of the land, but criminals had defied the court order by continuing to illegally build structures on the private land.
Joined by his colleagues from ActionSA, he sought to demonstrate that land-grabbing was unacceptable and offenders had to face the law, specifically arrests and prosecution.
He said he would not tolerate lawlessness which resulted in large financial implications for his department, especially because land invasion negatively affected all residents and placed an additional strain on the City’s already stretched budget.
“Illegal land invasion often results in the City being forced to provide rudimental services that were not budgeted for, thus exhausting the limited budget that is set aside for planned services,” said Kgosiemang.
He said having the culprits arrested would send a strong message to those looking to follow the footsteps of these land invaders.
“We are now working on a multidisciplinary approach to have the perpetuation of land invasions to be reduced to the lowest level. When you look at how they are doing it, you can see it is with the view that nothing will happen to them, so we want to ensure that something will happen to them.
“Internally within the City of Tshwane we have already established a land invasion unit that is less than two months old. It deals with such issues on the City of Tshwane-owned land, but now we want to extend it so that we not only look at City of Tshwane land, but private owners can also come forward to us and we assist them.”
Kgosiemang said they were going to seek that evictions be effected as soon as possible, to ensure that they arrest “any and all” possible expansion of the invaded land.
Pretoria News