Schubart Park residents must go - court
2011-09-23 08:27
Pretoria - An urgent interdict to prevent the Tshwane Metro municipality from evicting residents of the troubled Schubart Park flats in central Pretoria was dismissed on Thursday night.
"The appropriate relief cannot be an order to allow these people to go back into life-threatening circumstances," Judge Bill Prinsloo found in the North Gauteng High Court.
"The fact is that the people were not evicted, they were evacuated for their own safety."
Prinsloo ordered that the municipality and the Schubart Park residents' association draft an order on how the residents could be accommodated in the suburb of Saulsville and when they could return to their homes pending renovations to the buildings.
Earlier, the City of Tshwane said some residents of Schubart Park were due to be relocated to Saulsville because the buildings had been declared unsafe.
Mostly immigrants in buildings
Meanwhile, Beeld reported that only 500 of the 15 000 residents of Schubart Park were staying legally in the flats.
Authorities said they would provide accommodation to these 500 people and 300 of their relatives.
Sources told Beeld that more than 80% of the residents in the four apartment buildings were immigrants from mainly Zimbabwe who were staying there illegally.
A mayoral spokesperson said only 500 residents were registered as legal residents with the metro, which owned the building.
In a statement released by the city, it was stated that 172 households had agreed to be moved.
Saulsville residents against relocation
The city had intended doing the relocation on Thursday afternoon.
Hundreds of Saulsville residents staged a protest on Thursday night against the planned relocation to their suburb, west of Pretoria, Gauteng police said.
Captain Pinky Tsinyane said many of the residents had dispersed on their own and there was no need for police action but they would continue to monitor the situation.
Tshwane’s executive mayor, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, said at the Schubart Park flats on Thursday that the apartment buildings had been a problem for many years.