Tafelberg protesters take aim at Zille

ANT KATZ

Last week Friday, the Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre, representing RTC, brought an appeal before the Cape High Court to review the decision they referred to as Premier Helen Zille having “sold [out the] poor and working-class residents”.

The site – owned by the Western Cape government – was originally used as Tafelberg School and was to be sold for R135 million to the Phyllis Jowell Jewish Day School. For over a year, RTC has been trying to halt the sale, as they want the land to be used for an affordable social housing project. RTC’s aim is to see affordable housing for working-class people closer to their places of work, to make the city centre more inclusive.

Once the sale was announced, the City of Cape Town, the national government and local residents – many of whom were Jewish – expressed their opposition to the sale.  

Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre plans to argue that both the Province and the City had failed “to give effect to the right of poor and working-class people to access land and housing in well-located areas”.

Former Capetonian Andrew Feinstein (a former member of parliament) also declared his protest, which was against Zille for calling RTC’s opposition to the Tafelberg sale, “anti-Semitic”. He wrote in the Daily Maverick last Sunday, that as a Jew, “anti-Semitism is personal for me. It is irrelevant who the Tafelberg buyer is, because the fault is not with the buyer but with Zille’s administration.”

He added: “After years of promising to use the site for housing, the province issued a tender notice which allocated 90 per cent importance to price and 0 per cent to the social value of any future development.

“Zille saw no reason to reconsider this, even after it was revealed that her adviser, Gary Fisher, framed the tender in this way once his company had bought up properties in close proximity to the site.”

Feinstein, who now lives in the UK, said: “I know many of the leading protagonists within Reclaim The City. They simply don’t have a prejudicial bone in their collective body. Some are young Jews, proud of their heritage. Most are progressive black activists who make common cause with people of all backgrounds committed to a just society.

“Yes, they will point out the persistence of residential segregation, underpinned by largely unchanged patterns of white property ownership, but that is to oppose the legacy of racism, not to invoke it.”

However, said an RTC representative at the court last week Friday, their appeals had “fallen on deaf ears”.

RTC is livid with Zille whom, they say, has “demonstrated that our voices were not heard or considered”. Now, says RTC, Zille’s “spurious justification for selling the site will be tested”.