About 70 Fisantekraal residents marched to Parliament protesting for the implementation of the Enhanced People’s Housing Process. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
15 February 2017
On Wednesday, about 70 backyarders and residents from informal settlements in Fisantekraal marched to Parliament to protest over the first RDP houses to have been built in a partnership between the City of Cape Town and a non-for-profit company called Greenville Garden City.
Malivongwe Ngaye, a member of the Kingdom Change Agents Movement, said: “People don’t want semi-detached homes. They want to build their own homes.”
Under the Enhanced People’s Housing Process (EPHP), a government approved policy, residents can be directly involved in the building and decision making around the construction of their homes. Areas where the EPHP is implemented include Wallecedene in Kraaifontein and Witsand in Atlantis.
Some residents believe that the current houses in Greenville Garden City, the newly built RDP settlement, are made of inferior materials and that they lack privacy. They say they rejected the scheme from the start.
Residents marched from Keizersgracht Street to Parliament, singing and carrying blocks of the polystyrene and cement material used to build the walls of the new homes. (GroundUp has not been able to establish the durability and quality of the Australian invented material.)
A memorandum was handed over to Dr Sharon Horton-Herselman from the Ministry of Human Settlements.
