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Ramaphosa apologises for delay in land claims and compensation

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President Cyril Ramahosa has apologised on behalf of government for taking long to settle and finalize the more than R200 000 worth of land claims and compensation of some families in Gauteng.

He was speaking at the Presidential Land Handover ceremony in Mamelodi east of Pretoria.

The beneficiaries from Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane lost their land when they were forcefully removed from it during the Group Areas Act and 1913 Natives Land Act.

Ramphosa says government has started to restore the dignity of victims of land dispossession.

Some land beneficiaries in the Tshwane Metro say they still find their forceful removal from their ancestral land in the 1950s extremely painful. They said this when President Cyril Ramaphosa handed over land to dozens of beneficiaries at a ceremony in Mamelodi east of Pretoria.

The beneficiaries are from Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane.

One of the beneficiaries, Thobi Woco, whose family was removed from Kilnerton to the current day Mamelodi says they were a self-sustained community and now they have nothing.

“We had cattle; we had farms; we used to do farming great, but we were deprived of most of the things because what we received from the state or the government of the day, it was peanuts because the land we have was more valuable than what they gave us. R125 000 each, that time but it’s finished … finished, I think with that very year it was gone,” says Woco.

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