Keetmans land grab a ‘political football’

POLICE at Keetmanshoop were yesterday reluctant to help court messenger Desmond Andreas to demolish structures put up by illegal squatters on municipal plots at the town’s Tseiblaagte residential area.

The demolition had to be carried out yesterday after the land grabbers disobeyed an eviction order granted to the local council at the beginning of February. Andreas said a municipality bulldozer was ready to raze the structures but the Police told him to wait for instructions from the Police Inspector General, Lieutenant General Sebastian Ndeitunga. ‘They (Police) have failed. I was waiting since 14h00 for a go-ahead from the Police to carry out the demolition. It is now 16h30 and I am still waiting,’ Andreas said. About 150 land invaders were armed with knobkieries, sticks and stones, he said, indicating that they intended to resist the demolition. Andreas said the land invasion has become a ‘political football’ and this has prevented him from executing the demolition order, which should have been done when the land invaders defied the initial eviction order granted to the town council at the beginning of February. According to Andreas, a bulldozer was ready to demolish the structures on Friday too, but the exercise was put on hold following a last-minute intervention by the Karas governor’s special adviser, Lucia Basson.Basson’s intervention led to an agreement with the land grabbers to be relocated to 20 plots at the Illeni informal settlement.However, said Andreas, they backtracked on the agreement, citing an alleged high crime rate at Ileni informal settlement as reason for pulling out of the agreement. The land grabbing by hundreds of people who claim they have waited too long to be allocated plots by the local council started at the end of January. This prompted the council to obtain an eviction order against Simon Isaak, Melinda Fleermuis and Susanna Katjito, who were allegedly at the forefront.The land grabbers complied with the eviction notices when the council agreed to give their housing needs priority attention at a meeting it had convened with the Hendrik Tseib Commmunity liaison committee.But, a few days later, the land invasion resumed, with the squatters claiming the council had failed to honour its agreement to address their housing needs. This prompted the council to lay contempt of court charges against Isaak, Katjito and Fleermuis, and to apply for a final eviction order, which was granted. The final court order granted on March 9 by Magistrate Philanda Christiaan instructed Isaak, Fleermuis and Katjito to permanently stop the illegal land invasion. However, not even this court order convinced the land grabbers to vacate the municipal plots. Earlier, Police Deputy Commissioner Rudolf Isaak could not carry out arrests relating to the contempt of court charges, since the dockets were forwarded to the Prosecutor General to decide whether or not to prosecute the land invaders.