Residents of Macassar outside Cape Town are up in arms over the possibility that thousands of illegal railway dwellers who have occupied Cape Town’s Central Railway line, could be relocated to their already struggling community.
This comes amid ongoing efforts to reopen the line which was closed completely in 2019 due to vandalism and damaged infrastructure. Families living close to Prasa railway line have been waiting to be moved from the rail tracks for a few years.
Residents of Ward 109 in Macassar say this is the privately owned land which has been earmarked for the possible relocation of some 2 000 households.
A move they claim would cripple a community, already grappling with issues around erratic electricity supply, insufficient space at schools and under-resourced policing.
“There’s a lot of issues in Macassar. The crime also is very high here, just imagine 2 000 households, how the crime is going to be, how the schools will be, the power outages and these people are going to demand toilets, water, electricity, employment. Our people, there’s a lot of unemployment in our community already, so it’s going to affect us hugely here,” says Waseemah Flaendorp, community leader.
The local ward councilor says community members staged a protest at his offices last week demanding answers.
“Residents were extremely upset because they had received information that Prasa would like to purchase the land behind me, to relocate 2 000 households from their central line. Now residents were very upset about this because in 2022 a similar thing came up and residents met with HDA who represented Prasa at a meeting. At that meeting, HDA assured residents that they were jumping the gun and that HDA and Prasa while looking at the parcel of land behind me, they are also looking at various other parcels of land in the City of Cape Town and the parcel of land behind me at that stage did not seem viable,” says Peter Helfrich, Ward 109 councilor.
Efforts to rehabilitate and recover the central line which connects the CBD to Khayelitsha via Langa, Bonteheuwl and Philippi is ongoing.
The Project Management Committee of the Central Line Relocation & Recovery Project made up of among others the Departments of Transport, Human Settlements and Prasa says while it has secured land for the first phase of the relocation, in Philippi, it has not yet concluded any acquisition for phase two.
It says it will allow public participation as it had with the communities in the Philippi Wedge area during the first phase of the project.
