Hon Deputy Chair, the petition dealt with the report
... the petitioner, Mr Ndlovu, who was claiming his rights of his own mother who passed on, of a property which was situated at Thokoza hostel. The erf number was 8017. And Mr Ndlovu was basing his claim on the convention of certain rights into Leasehold or Ownership Act, Act 81 of 1988.
Chairperson, that's the basis of this petition and I am hoping that you did receive it; its copies were Announcements, Tablings and
Committee Reports, ATCd, to all of you. I'm sure you understand the processes that we have followed. But what is important now is to report to the House how far are we as the committee in terms of dealing with the report itself.
We undertook a visit to Gauteng after we have called Mr Ndlovu to present his case, to do a loco inspection of the place where the property was. And after doing that we also invited the Department of Human Settlements and also the Department Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs as well as the municipality that is affected.
I must indicate that the municipality was quite clear to say to us: The Act that Mr Ndlovu is basing his claim from doesn't apply in terms of the municipality itself because the municipality is governed by Municipal Finance Management Act, MFMA, which prohibits the municipality from financially compensating the petitioner.
We then engaged between ourselves and the municipality and the department with Mr Ndlovu present, and we made some proposal because at that time we discovered that Mr Ndlovu has already occupied two stands within the municipality: erf 1184 and erf 1134; which he felt strongly that it would compensate his mother's stand. But
unfortunately, the erf that he had identified were not readily rezoned by the municipality: one was meant for business and the other one was not yet identified what was it going to be used for by the municipality.
The committee discovered that during their negotiations between the municipality and Mr Ndlovu, there were some concessions in terms of compensating him without giving him rands and cents. But we said because this case is quite a very long case, which started since 2004 and us as NCOP we only received it in 2018.
In their concession they are agreeing that they will look at the issue of giving him one of the stands between the two that I have referred to.
And we recommended, as the committee, as follows:
The committee concluded that timeframe of four months be given within which the municipality should report back to the NCOP on the outcome of the settlement negotiations - which I have referred to. This should be done by providing NCOP with a progress report within 120 days of tabling this report to council.
In the process leading to the four months period, the municipality is requested to provide the NCOP with a monthly progress report indicating steps the municipality has taken to facilitate an action; the proposed settlement negotiation with Mr Ndlovu's family.
Progress on engagement with the Department of Human Settlements in terms of the convention of the erf and the progress on the engagement with the department of real estate on the proposed process for the swap transaction.
The municipality should also provide the committee with timeframe within which rezoning the erf should take place, since it is estimated that the entire process of rezoning should take approximately four months to finalise. The municipality should provide the committee with up to date monthly report on zoning - as I have indicated.
Those are the recommendations that the committee has made to the Ndlovu family regarding the matter. Thank you, hon Deputy Chair. [Applause.]
Question put:
