Housing Cooperatives Under Attack !

The Newtown Housing Cooperative (NHC), in the Johannesburg inner city, is currently being legally managed by the National Finance Housing Cooperation. This state funding institution is claiming about R14 million from the cooperative. With a relief order from the courts the NFHC has been able to take control of the financial management in the cooperative and has undermined the democratically elected board by constituting its own interim board. The members of the housing cooperative are not accepting responsibility for the debt and are rejecting the NFHC legal intervention to control the cooperative. According  to the the formally elected leadership of the cooperative the debt incurred for the Newton Housing Project was incurred by a project management NGO, called COPE. The leadership of the NHC believes that all project agreements were made with COPE and therefore they are not liable. They also believe that they are a legal entity, which is autonomous and needs to be treated as such by the National Housing Department and the NFHC. The cooperative members are demanding the following:

(1) they want the national Minister for Housing to provide them with information about the financial issues involving COPE;

(2) they want the NFHC to desist from trying to undermining the cooperative;

(3) that local government  defend social housing cooperatives in the inner city.

The NHC believes that if it losses the fight the future of social housing cooperatives and the independence of cooperatives in general are threatened in SOuth Africa. Currently inner city cooperatives have grown from 12 to about 24. If NHC is disbanded and the housing complex is converted into rental housing all other inner-city coops are under threat of being disbanded. Also if government can visibly violate the autonomy and independence of housing coops it can do this to any cooperative. On the 18th of March the members of NHC and cooperatives in Gauteng will be marching the NHFC offices to hand a over a memorandum of demands. These issues were discussed at the recent COPAC cooperative forum and it was resolved that cooperatives across Gauteng should be mobilised to join this mass action.  

 Contact: Mathews Mphonso, 076 143 7779, for further details.