Johannesburg will expropriate property, but ‘not just for the fun of it'

Mail & Guardian

15-05-2025

Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero at the official handover of the Southern Farms Housing Project. (X)
Johannesburg mayor
The move, Morero said in an interview with the
Mail & Guardian
, is aimed at accelerating the delivery of long-promised Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) homes to residents who have been on the government housing waiting list since 1996 and 1997.
'We are facing a backlog of around 300,000 people who are waiting for homes,' he said.
'We need to find innovative and efficient ways to address this urgent need for affordable housing for qualifying citizens.'
The Expropriation Act, signed into law last year, allows the minister of public works to seize private property for public purposes or in the public interest, with compensation provided at a 'fair and equitable' rate, rather than the market value.
In exceptional cases, land can be expropriated without compensation.
Morero said the city would ensure that abandoned hijacked buildings 'will be used for the public good'.
He said the hijacked buildings in the city centre belonged to people who were either overseas or deceased and some belonged to the government.
Morero said just under 50 hijacked buildings belonged to the government while more than 400 belong to private owners.
'Just under 100, we can't find the owners, they have abandoned the buildings. [On] those we will do sale of execution and possible expropriation. Sometimes we find that the owner has died and their children are not interested; these are the buildings that go through our sales and execution queue.
'We have buildings in the city that owe us over R15 million. The owners are overseas and they have abandoned them; they don't care. You would know that some of the people who owned some of the properties in the inner city are from England, Germany and we also found a few from Australia.
'In this situation, we do the process of sale and execution, where we go to court and say how much the owner owes us and then the court would grant that we can take the building and sell it to recover our money.'
He said some local owners had decided to stop paying rates and taxes on hijacked buildings. In such instances, the owners write to the city to seek assistance to remove the occupants.
In the past, the city had not done this, said Morero.
'These owners are now coming back because of this initiative we are doing in the city. They will come and say 'we want to work with the city and we have the money to renovate'. Their only demand is that we remove the people so that they can restore the building.
'The last category is the ones which are owned by the government, provincial government and the city. We have been getting court orders so we can remove the people who have hijacked the building. We already have 12 court orders and we are still looking for more, then we will proceed removing those people.'
Morero dismissed concerns about the controversial nature of expropriation, emphasising that the process was in line with the Constitution's provisions for public good.
'With the Expropriation Act, which is not controversial, it's the right thing to do. We all appreciate and acknowledge that indigenous people of this country, the land was taken away from them, so there's nothing controversial, it is a redress of what has happened in the past,' he said.
'You do not just expropriate for the fun of expropriating.
'We expropriate because we now need to build a library there, we want to build a school or we want to build a clinic and we want to take this building, which has become a nuisance for society, and turn it around into housing opportunities or student accommodation. That is for the public good, and there's nothing wrong with it.'
Morero said that where the city needed to expropriate, it would do so without hesitation.
In 2018, while mayor of Johannesburg,
Speaking to M&G on Tuesday, Mashaba — who now leads ActionSA — said there was no political will in the city to deal with the issue of hijacked buildings.
He said when he left the city, 154 buildings to the value of R32 billion were already awarded to the private sector. By now, those buildings should have been revamped, he said.
The Johannesburg Property Company should have continued with the programme of taking over hijacked buildings.
'For us as South Africans to allow them to start all over again, something that was already passed by council to be given to the private sector, that was R32 billion worth of investment,' Masahaba said.
'I had already identified over 600 properties and committed to release a minimum of 100 a year. You can imagine that we would be very far with the redevelopment of that city [if this had happened]. Unfortunately there's no political will whatsoever and the current leadership is not about public service, it's about something else.'
Referring to an example of how the city was already expropriating abandoned buildings, Morero said it had started in Lilian Ngoyi Street (previously called Bree Street).
In July 2023, after an explosion caused by methane gas,
During a media briefing a day after the explosion, the city in a briefing had estimated that the repairs would cost R178 million, however reports have been that the city will be spending R200 million on the project.
Following delays to the repairs of the street, the city after a mutual separation agreement and settlement with the first contractor hired another contractor who is expected to complete phase one of the project by August 2025.
Morero said there has been no real escalation of costs to the project as a result of the change of the contractor, saying these would be minimal, and would only be able to be quantified as the project comes to a finish.
'Im not sure if we settled at seven or eight million of the work that was outstanding, they were claiming about 19 million.'
He said there were 'about three or four buildings in Lilian Ngoyi which have been hijacked'. These were also being 'taken back' by the city, he said.
'By the time we finish, even the hijacked buildings would have been changed, somebody now owns them, they have been run properly with residents inside.'
During his State of the City address, the mayor spoke about how the city should act rapidly in addressing housing issues in Gauteng.
On Friday, Morero unveiled the Southern Farms project, a mixed development that would unlock 43,000 housing units.
'I also announced the State of the City address … an 83,000 mixed housing opportunities development. I'm quite excited about it, it has never been done in South Africa on that magnitude and we will be doing it. These are part of the thing we say we will make happen,' he said.