Murray Camp evictions loom

The 2 000 residents of Murray Camp are miserable and frightened after receiving letters which seem to presage another mass eviction. Yet what has kept Swaziland peaceful for so long is the belief held by so many citizens that there is a rightful place for them in this country, where they can settle down and make use of the land.

The disruption to this peace of mind after the introduction of title deed properties has seriously weakened the social fabric of the nation, and nowadays no one can feel certain of their rights to habitation unless they physically hold a title deed in their possession.

The Murray Camp case is a typical case of the confusion over land use in Swaziland, but it also has ominous overtones for the nation at large. Legally, the 2 000 people living in Murray Camp are squatters – people who are living illegally on someone else’s property.

In their minds, however, they are making use of land that is not being made use of and to them there is no difference to unused title deed land and unused Swazi Nation Land.

Suddenly they are told that the land they have occupied for years has been bought by someone else in order to create subdivisions for habitation and they are asked to pay the going rates for those plots if they wish to live on the same land they have already been living on for so long. Legally, the residents have no standing.

In South Africa, this situation caused so much unrest that they introduced the idea of squatters’ rights – basically the right of a person to become the legal land owner if they have squatted on unused land for 30 years or more.

The theory is that if an owner hasn’t made use of a piece of land in 30 years then they really don’t have a use for it.

If they did, they would chase off the squatters to prevent them building there. Swaziland needs a similar mechanism to handle the claims of poor people to unused land they occupy.

Otherwise an unscrupulous businessman could go around the country buying up land people are living on and then selling it back to them, which is probably how the residents of Murray Camp see their situation.

No fine is perfectly fine

A kombi driver who ran a red traffic light while escaping from the police was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment with no fine by Magistrate Sebenzile Ndlela-Kunene.

This decision has lead to grumbling over the apparent severity of the sentence, but Magistrate Ndlela-Kunene was entirely correct not to offer the driver the option of a fine.

After all, he wasn’t just accused of unnecessarily putting the lives of his passengers in danger (by running a red light), but he also did so in an apparent bid to escape the police, thus proving that he knew what he was doing was wrong (and yet he had the temerity to insist on pleading ‘not guilty’!).

Not all public transport drivers are guilty of risking their passengers lives, but the few operators who do not put the safety and convenience of their passengers before their own interests are not providing a service to the public; they are taking advantage of the public and they do not deserve the court’s mercy.

After all, their job description is to get their passengers from point A to point B in the same state that they found them and, if they can’t do that, then they must be encouraged to find other jobs.

Luckily for him, Mfanzile Mnisi will have ample time to reflect on his failures to his customers and, hopefully, he will learn from this experience.

The police must be commended for their presence of mind in this incident.

Instead of charging after the kombi driver in hot pursuit – a situation that lead to 14 deaths earlier this year – the police patiently waited and picked him up four days later. This consideration for the public is commendable and must be encouraged.

The act of threatening passengers with death from oncoming traffic must not.

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