Okahandja residents seek complaint back
Protest action expected today
Nothing came of petitions addressed to the municipality, minister and prime minister, now disgruntled residents want to take the complaint directly to the president.
The residents of Okahandja will march to the municipality again today, this time to ask for their original complaint back.The disgruntled residents have been sent back and forth in the past year in an attempt to straighten out the management of the town.
Seth Gariseb, a community activist, says: "We are going to withdraw our petition and we will take it directly to the president."
The complaint was handed over to the Minister of Urban and Rural Development, Erastus Uutoni, in Windhoek about a year ago and later to the office of the prime minister, Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. The complaint was returned to Uutoni, who referred it to the town council.
Gariseb says the disgruntled residents now want the original document back.
A lack of services, especially water and sewage, power and land, is at the top of the list of demands.
Residents of the RCC Camp, where about 20 families live, are waiting for the sheriff to come and remove them. The land they live on has been sold out cheaply from under them, say the residents.
"In Promised Land and at RCC Camp they will come and remove people again after the (2024) election. We don't want what happened in Katima to happen in Okahandja," adds Gariseb.
In September last year, residents of settlements in Katima Mulilo were removed from the land, and their houses were bulldozed.
Else Kehinana has been living in the RCC Camp for the past 21 years. She remembers the houses were given to employees so that their families could stay somewhere while the workers were deployed nationwide to road works.
According to her, all the families had already applied to the municipality for the land, but no one ever received a response. "We who have been sitting here for years, how should we just leave to another place?" she asked. "How do they manage to send us to the rubbish dumps?"
"We pay our water and at the time we were already given erf numbers. We even called in the minister, and he came in 2019 and visited our homes. He said they were worthy houses," she says.
Evelina Ndueliwa remembers how she started working at the Road Contractors Company (RCC) in 1995 and got her house in 2003 with the state-owned enterprise.
“My home is here and my family is here, including five children who are still at school. We already have services here, although not power. We don't know where we're going. The rubbish dump is kilometers away," she elaborates.
The municipality's plan is to resettle the residents of the RCC Camp at the town's landfill.
Gariseb says several civil organisations representing different parts of Okahandja's residents will also participate in the protest action today.
Furthermore, the well-known local musicians Jericho and Dixon will also come to show their support, he says. – [email protected]