Forum 4 Service Delivery march to Matjhabeng municipal offices over hijacked housing project

Over a hundred members of a civic political party, Forum 4 Service Delivery (F4SD), have converged at Welkom CBD to make their way to the Matjhabeng municipality’s offices to denounce the “skeleton in the cupboard” housing project that has left many in limbo.

South Africa’s emerging social movement will hold a peaceful protest at the municipal offices where they will call for Matjhabeng mayor Thanduxolo Khalipa to listen to their grievances as they will be handing over the memorandum with a list of their demands.

The lobby group says they demand the completion of a housing project that has been abandoned and “hijacked” by groupings of mostly foreign nationals leaving its intended beneficiaries still homeless.

“We want the illegal occupants to be removed from the project so that it is completed and for the intended beneficiaries to immediately occupy the units,” said President of F4SD Mbahare Kekana.

“We have been working with the community on this and we will not rest until the municipality fixes the mess it has created,” added Kekana.

In July, residents of Dichokoleteng in Thabong, accused some municipal officials of illegally selling their sites.

They said, they were the original beneficiaries of about one-thousand-three hundred allocated spaces.

They were allegedly procured from a private owner, where the local municipality would build RDP houses for them.

Some claimed they received their stand numbers in 2004 and are battling to get them back.

Kekana said is high time the municipality take the fall and do things right.

Meanwhile, the embattled municipality has been coupled with a series of grievances since the beginning of the year.

In July, a group of aggravated service providers marched to the municipality to demand long overdue compensation for their rendered services, and the protest turned violent, where the protesters torched and vandalised the municipality’s property.