By Gcina Ntsaluba
The community of Sigidi village and the wider Amadiba area are celebrating a significant victory in the Makhanda High Court, as a final ruling confirmed their customary land rights and halted an illegal land invasion project. The judgment, in Case No. 1415/2023, represents a major triumph for the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) and local residents who have fought for over two decades to defend their ancestral lands.
The case centered around an incident in April 2023, when Nero Dlamini and his alleged backers used a tractor loaded backhoe to excavate an area the size of a football field within a critical biodiversity zone and an area for cattle in Sigidi. This land is vital for the village’s livestock grazing, forming the bedrock of their food security.
“The communal land is always everybody taking advantage because people treat communal land as no man’s land. That is why those people are rich are easily to just go and do what they think is good,” said Nonhle Mbuthuma, a prominent voice from the ACC.
Mbuthuma who is a joint winner of the 2024 Goldman Environmental Prize, and fellow women residents were beaten with knobkerries while attempting to halt building work on a new structure inside the protected coastal zone in April 2023.
The Makhanda High Court’s ruling permanently stopped the Sigidi land invasion project. The court ordered Dlamini and Chief Lunga Baleni, who supported the land invasion, to pay the legal costs of the village members who brought the case. Dlamini has also been ordered to remove the fence around the illegal excavation, clear tons of bricks, and rehabilitate the destroyed land “to the best of his ability”.
The ACC highlighted concerning elements of the case, including answering affidavits with falsified signatures, and statements dismissing AmaMpondo customary law.
“Defending our land for over 20 years, we are used to fake affidavits. Both SANRAL and the Australian mining company have put them into use, including affidavits from dead persons and people who never walked on this earth,” said Mbuthuma.
The sacred nature of community lands
The court’s decision reaffirmed the sacred nature of community cattle fences, graves, and kraals, emphasising that “false ‘development’ for the rich and politically connected” cannot override these.
“Let it be known to rural communities in the whole of Eastern Cape and elsewhere where false development is pushed to grab land, that the chief doesn’t own community land. It is owned by the people staying there in terms of their customary law, as the Court confirmed,” the ACC declared.
The ruling further establishes that rural communities have the right to give “free prior and informed consent”, or to say no to projects they don’t want on their land.
“Where people have land and use it, like in our threatened area on the coast, there is no hunger,” the ACC stated, linking land ownership directly to food security.
The ACC also used the opportunity to address the national debate on land expropriation, asserting that “Land reform has collapsed, and it is corrupted by private profit interests or state take-overs to benefit a few wherever land restitution is done.”
They contend that “It is community land in Pondoland and everywhere else that is the target of the new Land Expropriation Act.”
This landmark ruling is expected to set a precedent for other communities in the Eastern Cape and beyond, empowering them to defend their land rights against unchecked development and land grabbing.
