{"id":249504,"date":"2023-02-08T17:53:09","date_gmt":"2023-02-08T15:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-for-r14m-in-damages-claim\/"},"modified":"2023-02-08T17:53:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T15:53:09","slug":"man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m\/","title":{"rendered":"Man dragged naked from his shack sues City of Cape Town for R1.4m"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/marecia_damons\/20230208_110257_2.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"warn_big\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Civil society groups march to the City of Cape Town\u2019s offices at the Civic Centre to launch a campaign to \u201cexpose law enforcement brutality\u201d. Bulelani Qolani is suing the City for R1.4m in damages claim. Photo: Marecia Damons<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>About 60 people from civil society marched to the City of Cape Town\u2019s offices to launch a campaign to \u201cexpose law enforcement brutality\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>The demonstration also marks the start of Bulelani Qolani\u2019s litigation bid against the City.<\/li>\n<li>Qolani made headlines for being dragged naked from his shack in Khayelitsha by City of Cape Town law enforcement officers who were evicting people from a new settlement in July 2020, during lockdown.<\/li>\n<li>The City has been served with Qolani\u2019s legal papers and has been given 15 days to respond.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m.gif\" width=\"1\">About 60 people from several civil society groups marched to the Civic Centre in Cape Town on Wednesday. The groups want to \u201cexpose law enforcement brutality\u201d and to mark Bulelani Qolani\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/khayelitsha-man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-in-2020-to-sue-city-for-damages\/\">litigation bid<\/a> against the City of Cape Town. Qolani was dragged naked from his home in Khayelitsha by Anti-Land Invasion officers during lockdown in 2020.<\/p>\n<p>Qolani is suing the City for R1.4-million for hospital and medical expenses, psychotherapy, trauma counselling, other expenses he incurred during and after the incident, and loss of earnings.<\/p>\n<p>The marchers want the City to include staff from the provincial Department of Social Development alongside its officers when people face eviction. They also want basic services in informal settlements and well-located land for affordable housing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor many years, landless people in informal settlements in Cape Town have sustained both physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Law Enforcement,\u201d they said in their statement.<\/p>\n<p>Qolani is represented by housing movement Ndifuna Ukwazi. His attorney Danielle Louw said the City had been served the legal papers and had 15 days to respond.<\/p>\n<p>Louw said during during negotiations between March 2021 and August 2022 the City had made a settlement offer but this was rejected. Qolani then decided to take legal action. \u201cHe has a right to claim compensation for the injuries done to him. The physical injuries, but more so the emotional injuries and harm to his dignity,\u201d said Louw.<\/p>\n<p>Luthando Mcuntula, Covid informal settlement leader and member of The People\u2019s Movement, said the marchers also wanted to stop law enforcement officers demolishing homes without proper eviction notices or court orders. \u201cThey come at any time, even in the middle of the night, without an eviction order or warning. They knock and just take away your shack. When you try to talk and ask them questions, they just take you straight to the cells.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are dealing once again with oppression and brutality by law enforcement,\u201d said Buhle Booi of Ndifuna Ukwazi. What the City did to Bulelani will never be done to another person again. As communities, we feel the pain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Riaan Koeberg of civil society organisation Group For Developers said, \u201cWhy must we fight for our basic rights? The only thing we have left is our dignity, but now we must fight for that also. We are tired.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kenneth Matlawe of the Housing Assembly said the campaign was also about dignity for people living in informal settlements. \u201cWe are living in shacks that are falling apart and in places that are dysfunctional. These informal settlements have no trees and there are no recreational spaces,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The memorandum was accepted by Vincent Botto, the City\u2019s executive director of safety and security. Botto said the City would respond to the demands. The City had not responded to GroundUp\u2019s questions by the time of publication.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 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\/2023\/02\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Civil society groups march to the City of Cape Town\u2019s offices at the Civic Centre to launch a campaign to \u201cexpose law enforcement brutality\u201d. Bulelani Qolani is suing the City for R1.4m in damages claim. Photo: Marecia Damons About 60 people from civil society marched to the City of Cape Town\u2019s offices to launch a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":249505,"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":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-249504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/man-dragged-naked-from-his-shack-sues-city-of-cape-town-for-r1-4m.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249504","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=249504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}