Land invasion in Parklands yesterday afternoon as a result of DA incentives

Yesterday afternoon, private security firm 1 Stop Lifemed responded to reports of people erecting makeshift dwellings in a park between the Pinnacle and Summerville complexes. Upon arrival, the team found the area strewn with debris and refuse, with a fire burning among dry reeds and shrubs. The security officers ordered those involved to douse the flames, clean the area, and stop construction.

“If these illegal structures are allowed to be completed, they become very difficult to remove later,” a company spokesperson warned. The firm also cited health hazards arising from the absence of sanitation, noting that some individuals were reportedly using boundary walls as toilets.

The incident reflects a broader increase in informal settlements across the Cape, incentivised by the DA’s policies since 2006. In Sea Point, Jacques Weber, chairperson of the local City Improvement District, has called for coordinated community action to address what he describes as a growing problem of aggressive street children along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Weber, a veteran of government and private security, cautioned that while resources remain limited, communities cannot afford to rely solely on municipal intervention. “We are not asking for an army or hundreds of police officers,” he said. Local collective action is essential if we are to keep our neighbourhoods safe.

Both Parklands and Sea Point now illustrate mounting tension in Cape Town from land invasion incentivised by title deeds and free services.

The rise of informal settlements in Cape Town is, “predominantly the result of a frustration of law and order by a heavily politicised High Court panel, renowned in the legal profession for being far more politically biased than High Courts for other provinces. The main legal mechanisms frustrating clearances of illegal settlements are the PIE and ESTA acts, which in their actual text states that they were intended to protect tenants from unfair eviction practices, but have now come to be interpreted as protecting illegal squatters.

But this is not the only factor. Since 2006, the DA have instituted a policy called “Violence Prevention through Urban upgrading”. In practice, this German government-backed initiative has not resulted in any clear reduction in criminal or violent activity, but has massively incentivised land settlements, since as soon as the land is settled, DA councillors and municipal workers will work hard to ensure that these people get title deeds and utilities, whose payment is unenforceable. As the City often boasts, their service delivery in this regard far outsrips the ANC’s in the rest of the country, making the Western Cape the most accommodating province in which to illegally occupy land.

As the City ratchets up their levies on the middle class, already squeeed by skyrocketing property evaluations due to foreign real estate marketing and restricted land access due to ballooning illegal settlements, the expenditure on these almost ungovernable enclaves rises beyong the ability of the City to keep up.

Yet when faced with the opportunity to demand a fairer share of national revenue, the mayor has refused, insisting that the tax revenue of its residents must be handed, in the majority, to the ANC-controlled national government.

There are several fixes to this problem. The DA can back the Peoples Bill in the provincial parliament, grabbing back power over the budget, policing, transport and other systems. They can pass their own tenancy laws, since housing is a concurrent schedule in the constitution. And they can bargain for their residents to receive a bigger share of their own tax money back. They could even cut billions in unnecessary and wasterful vanity projects.

But Geordin Hill-Lewis remains committed to wealth redistribution and ANC-style transformation, refusing to even exploit Sakeliga’s 2022 Concourt ruling that would make BEE procurement quotas unenforceable.”

Read more on land invasion in the Cape HERE.