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The High Court in Pretoria on Friday said that an exclusive Afrikaner township called Kleinfontein is illegal, and the residents who have moved into the 650-odd homes are acting illegally.

Kleinfontein Aandeleblok (Edms) Bpk have been allowing residents to build houses and use the land for residential purposes without adhering to the necessary legal requirements or building requirements.

The High Court has now ordered the City of Tshwane to “immediately take appropriate steps to enforce all relevant laws relating to planning and building regulation in as far as it relates to the farms comprising the Kleinfontein settlement”.

The high court has stopped short of telling the City of Tshwane how to deal with the directors of Kleinfontein Aandeleblok, but criminal charges might very well be instituted.

Kleinfontein was built on land allocated for agricultural use by the Boere-Vryheidsbeweging in the late 1990s as a “growth point for Afrikaner self-determination”, and now includes at least residences, a school, a community centre, a shopping mall, an old age home, and a minor industrial sector.

The land has never been rezoned or subdivided, and no development plans have been approved by the local authorities. Kleinfontein Aandeleblok’s management board offers basic services to the community and runs on groundwater and Eskom, although they charge a higher premium for power to offset costs.

Kleinfontein has been underpaying the City of Tshwane as a result of the unregistered development.

The ruling comes after a dispute erupted between four shareholders and the directors of Kleinfontein Aandeleblok. The shareholders are ostensibly against further development of the township, saying that it is affecting the quality of services in the town. They took the fight to Kleinfontein Aandeleblok by riling up other shareholders and urging them to withhold levies.

The disgruntled shareholders have now asked the court to interdict Kleinfontein Aandeleblok from expanding further until ‘laws relating to planning and building regulations have been complied with’.

Lex Middelberg, a member of the Tshwane council for the Republican Conference of Tshwane, says the illegal development in Kleinfontein is negatively affecting the wider Tshwane communities, by paying levies on ‘farmland’ and not for ‘unpermitted use’, which is nine times more.

“Other residents of Tshwane are subsidising Kleinfontein, but we don’t have money [as a city] to fix our roads or make provision for continued water supply when Rand Water cuts its supply to do maintenance.”

A professional valuer said he did a valuation of the Kleinfontein property in 2014 and even then, the property rates if correctly calculated, would have run into millions.

Even when you trek laager against Tshwane, you’re still in Tshwane.

[source:moneyweb]