{"id":227891,"date":"2022-06-03T09:36:05","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T07:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T09:36:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T07:36:05","slug":"families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move\/","title":{"rendered":"Families living in Cape Town nature reserve told to move"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/siphokazi_mnyobe\/driftsands-siphokazimnyobe-20220602.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Nosakhele Gqirhana says she cannot afford to pay to move her material and possessions to a new location. Photo: Siphokazi Mnyobe<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Driftsands Nature Reserve in Cape Town, which has been occupied by thousands of families, has lost its value as a nature reserve, according to the Western Cape government.<\/li>\n<li>The Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning intends to de-proclaim the reserve.<\/li>\n<li>Meanwhile some of the families who moved onto the land have been told to move to another part of the reserve.<\/li>\n<li>The Western Cape government says they live on a wetland and along a dam wall and the area is not fit for habitation.<\/li>\n<li>The families say they cannot afford the cost of moving their shacks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Families living on and around a dam wall in a huge informal settlement in the Driftsands Nature Reserve in Cape Town have been told to move. But the families say they won\u2019t move unless CapeNature helps pay for the relocation.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>The land was occupied at the peak of the Covid pandemic. Today, there are thousands families in the Dubai informal settlement, according to community leader Thando Linganiso. Of these, a large number live on the dam wall or in the wetlands.<\/p>\n<p>The Western Cape government says the area is not fit for habitation. The families living on the dam wall or in the wetlands have been told to move to other land by 26 June. The land they have been told to move to is about two kilometres away, also within the reserve.<\/p>\n<p>Nathan Adriaanse, spokesperson at the Western Cape Department of Human Settlements, said CapeNature, which owns the land, obtained an eviction order in 2020. But during the National State of Disaster this could not be enforced. He says the new land is more suitable for the families.<\/p>\n<p>He said some of the reserve isn\u2019t suitable for settlement because it consists of wetlands, the Kuils River and \u201cflood reduction infrastructure\u201d. He said the occupiers had erected structures on the dam wall, which puts them at risk if there is heavy rainfall.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe must emphasise that we are asking residents who are at risk to voluntarily relocate to an area within the Driftsands Nature Reserve,\u201d said Adriaanse.<\/p>\n<p>However, the future of the reserve is unclear. The provincial environment department <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/documents\/8535-driftsands-nature-reserve-2021.pdf\">issued a notice<\/a> in the provincial gazette on 21 January of its intention to abolish Driftsands Nature Reserve. According to the notice, the reserve, which was set up in 1983, has been \u201csubject to encroachment by informal settlements\u201d since 2004.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn 2020 the nature reserve was further severely impacted by an influx of people \u2026 the natural environment inside the reserve has been and continues to be irrevocably transformed and the ecological impact in the occupied areas is irreversible.\u201d The department said large areas of the reserve had lost their biodiversity value.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe abolition of the Driftsands Nature Reserve will enable other land use options to be formally considered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to CapeNature\u2019s Land Affairs and Legal Services team leader Tabassum Paleker, the Western Cape government has not decided what to do with the land as yet.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, residents say they want help with the move.<\/p>\n<p>Zandile Gomba says she moved to Driftsands because she could no longer afford the R600 a month she was paying to rent a shack. \u201cI know that I\u2019ve broken the law by occupying land illegally but I had no choice. I could not afford rent after losing my job during the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She is afraid the move will cost her money she does not have. \u201cCapeNature should meet us halfway by providing transport and material,\u201d said Gomba.<\/p>\n<p>Linganiso said most of the people in the area are unemployed and asking them to use their own money to move is unfair.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe people here live in unbearable conditions. Human Settlements told us they can\u2019t build on this land because it is wetland. We can\u2019t agree to move without making sure that services are delivered on the land we are expected to move to,\u201d said Linganiso.<\/p>\n<p>When GroundUp visited the area on Saturday 28 May, a crowd of more than 500 people had gathered outside in the rainy weather for a meeting on the move and to elect a relocation committee.<\/p>\n<p>They said they wanted help moving, materials to build shacks and services on the new land.<\/p>\n<p>Nosakhele Gqirhana told GroundUp she had bought material for her shack at a scrapyard for R1,000 and was afraid it would not survive the move. She came to Cape Town in 2020 to be with her daughter who was ill. Her daughter has since died. Gqirhana is unemployed and has three grandchildren, all under ten years old.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI won\u2019t be able to afford transport that will relocate me to the new land and still buy material,\u201d said Gqirhana.<\/p>\n<p>Linganiso said he was trying to set up a meeting with CapeNature and provincial government officials.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nosakhele Gqirhana says she cannot afford to pay to move her material and possessions to a new location. Photo: Siphokazi Mnyobe The Driftsands Nature Reserve in Cape Town, which has been occupied by thousands of families, has lost its value as a nature reserve, according to the Western Cape government. The Department of Environmental Affairs [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-227891","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/families-living-in-cape-town-nature-reserve-told-to-move.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}