Yusuf Omar
TENJIWE Mlotywa took to the stage and kissed mayor Parks Tau on both cheeks.
The 70-year-old then spun in circles with the finesse of a ballerina, ululating at the top of her voice. The crowd ululated with her.
Yesterday, Mlotywa was the first of 305 residents to receive her prized title deed for her property in Soweto.
Her property includes a shop inherited from her father.
She said the family had waited since 2005 for the deeds.
Tau described the award ceremony in Kyalami, north of Joburg, as “the fruits of freedom”.
“Property and land ownership are the cornerstones of a successful country… This will allow people to climb the ladder of prosperity,” he said.
Enabling people to have assets was part of the process of transformation.
The process, the first of its kind in SA, audited, verified and transferred urban land to residents unable to own urban land during the apartheid era.
“Over the next three to five years, the programme seeks to transfer and release approximately 3 700 properties in Alexandra, the greater Soweto area, Orange Farm and Ivory Park,” said Johannesburg Property Company (JPC) acting chief operations officer Kululwa Muthwa.
While emphasising the benefits to the community, she acknowledged “this will also increase the rates, taxes and service repayment base of the city”.
Research commissioned by Urban LandMark reported that “between 1994 and 2009, 2.94 million housing units and serviced sites have either been built or were under construction in SA. By September 2010, 1.44 million of these properties were formally registered on the Deeds Registry.”
This meant that about half the residents in those houses had not yet received title deeds for their homes.
Muthwa said one of the things delaying title deeds was that “some of the townships are not formalised yet, making housing regulating difficult”.
The JPC began its land regularisation programme in 2005, but many recipients have been waiting for years before that.