Squatter, sewage - and crime -crisis in the Cradle of Humankind

Hekpoort residents are in an epic battle to get the Mogale City Council to stop an influx of tens of thousands of apparently unemployed vagrants in the area. In this interview with BizNews, attorney Christopher Bean describes the drama surrounding the council’s building of 208 low-cost houses in an area where there was an invasion in 2019, and around which between 150 000 and 200,000 people are living in squatter camps without facilities. To add to the crisis, local residents have said that if outsiders get those houses, they’re going to burn them down. “…it’s no longer a question of providing housing for local people. It's now using this whole area to relocate thousands of people from the Krugersdorp area to another place where there's no jobs, where there's no accommodation, so they have to build shacks. There's no water, there's no sewage, there's no schools, there's no nothing.” Meanwhile, crime has spiralled with one holiday resort being hit with 12 armed robberies in 12 months. “There are about three security companies operating in this area and everybody who is on the farms is armed…”. Bean says they are hoping for a roundtable solution that will become a settlement agreement that “I know will apply in so many other cases all over the whole country….when there is this type of quote, invasion, semi-invasion, no invasion has taken place yet…have some set of rules as to who comes there, what happens when they get here, what are the facilities that we're providing, what opportunities to make a human kind of organisation rather than a squatter camp”.