April 2015 Tel: 021 811 7654Neighbourhood news, taken seriously

Brazen dealers sit near the Railway Road footbridge on the industrial side of the Woodstock rail reserve, known to the locals as Maskani. On the stairs, an addict smokes what seems to be tik.

Grim railway an ‘endless battle’SECURITY agencies Woodstock believe they are fighting a losing battle because of the neglected state of the railway line, and is appealing to the Passen-ger Railway Association of South Africa (Prasa), who owns the land, to take ur-gent action.

Woodstock’s railway line has be-come arguably the area’s worst crime hotspot. A brazen drug trade thrives in the rail reserve, said the Woodstock Improvement District (WID) operations manager, John Julies.

The area known as Maskani, around the Railway Road footbridge on the in-dustrial side of Woodstock, attracts criminals to the area, says Mr Julies. The dilapidated buildings nearby shel-ter addicts and prostitutes and has be-come a rubbish dump. Because of the drug trade, the footbridge is a hotspot for robberies and muggings, said Mr Julies.

A police source says about nine rob-beries in the Maskani area are reported

every week. The WID may not patrol the rail-

way reserve since it is officially private property belonging to Prasa. The WID’s mandate is to patrol public spaces only. But the situation is so dire that the WID ventures onto the property at least twice a month, said Mr Julies.

Prasa spokesperson Riana Scott did not answer queries from WoodstockLife about when the last clean-up of the line was undertaken. She did say that Pra-sa’s budget was constrained, but that “every effort will be made to clean pre-cincts to an acceptable standard” from April.

WoodstockLife recently witnessed a group of local men smoke a white sub-stance they bought at Maskani inside a nearby derelict building belonging to Prasa.

Mr Julies said he fears that the build-ing may soon cave in and kill dozens of people who sleep there. The informal

continued on page 5

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www.woodstocklife.co.za info@woodstocklife.co.zaApril 20152

By Aubrena ArmstrongTHE bloodied body of a 19-year-old woman was recently found in the Brik-kie park on the corner of Upper Moun-tain Road and Rhodes Avenue in Uni-versity Estate.

The Woodstock police confirmed that the woman was murdered in the park.

According to the Woodstock police spokesperson Sergeant Hilton Malila, the woman, identified as Natalie Frans, was a known street addict in the area.

He said she sustained multiple stab wounds as well as head injuries. A bloodstained rock was found on the scene.

Sgt Malila said no formal arrests have been made but a number of sus-pects were brought in for questioning and later released after forensic tests were completed.

Sandy Shepard, chair of the Uni-versity Estate Residents’ Association (UERA), said she doesn’t know what to make of the incident.

The discovery of the body is the most recent incident in what appears to be a sudden increase in crime in the area.

Heightened expressions of concerns can be seen on the UERA Facebook page with three serious crimes report-ed on the page since January this year.

The crimes include a mugging, as-sault and robbery and a house burglary. Ms Shepard said there has been an in-crease in break-ins in the area. In the most recent incident criminals forced their way into a house with a crowbar.

A resident, Lulu de Pontes, who was at the scene when the body was discov-ered, said the experience was scary.

She was standing at the MyCiTi bus stop opposite the park when a man ap-proached her, frantically screaming “there’s a body in the park”.

“I saw him move forward and he was like looking at something and then he turned and he ran out of the park straight towards me at a hell of a speed ... I realised he’s actually panicked,” said Ms De Pontes.

After an unsuccessful attempt at contacting the South African Police

Service’s (SAPS’) 10111 emergen-cy number, Ms De Pontes called the Woodstock police’s patrol vehicle to come to the scene. She said the police took about 20 minutes to respond to the call.

“There are a lot of other dodgy things going on around that field and in the neighbourhood,” said Ms De Pontes.

Andrew Geel, chair of the U-Watch Neighbourhood Watch, does not believe that there has been an increase in crime in the area, but rather an increase in the amount of information people are sharing.

He said the U-Watch will pay more attention to the Brikkie park as it has become a hotspot.

Sgt Malila said there will be no extra patrols in the area because “the area of Upper Woodstock always in the past received adequate policing and this in-cident is isolated”.

The police have not yet released the name of the victim.

Young woman murdered in University Estate

Budget Banners on fire: The landmark banner business on the corner of Salt River Road and Victoria Road was evacuated recently after an old fridge on the top storey caught alight. The owner of Budget Banners, Philip Stam, said the fridge and some dry walls were the only things damaged in the fire. The room was unoccupied and the fire was extinguished quickly, he said. No one was injured.

Email: barrie@communitylifemedia Phone: 021 811 7654

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www.woodstocklife.co.za info@woodstocklife.co.zaApril 2015 3

WITH the revamp of the Salt River Cir-cle and the implementation of the bicy-cle lanes along Albert Road in Salt River and Woodstock almost complete, some locals have started to worry that the changes will lead to even more traffic congestion.

The pavements around the Salt Riv-er circle have been dropped to make it easier for people with wheelchairs to cross the road. New signs have been put up, and contractors could recently be seen putting up railings at the pe-destrian crossings at the exit points of the circle, which now bear the names of the roads running from the circle.

The City’s head of transport, Brett Herron, said all five exits from the Salt River Circle (Albert Road towards Woodstock, Voortrekker Road, Dur-ham Avenue, Salt River Road and Al-bert Road towards Salt River) now have formal pedestrian crossings. Previously there have only been two.

By the end of May, the cycle lanes running from Observatory will be com-plete.

Mr Herron said the cycle lanes, cur-rently depicted by yellow markings on either side of Albert Road, will further be demarcated with green paint and more signage.

Businesses along Albert Road voiced concerns that the new lanes, which took away some parking space and narrowed Albert Road, are causing more conges-tion than before.

Warda Rahim of Salt River Ratepay-ers’ Association complained that only a handful of people cycle down Albert Road. “I don’t understand why they spent millions of rands to accommodate 10 people.”

Business owner Enrique Jephtha said he would have preferred demar-

cated parking bays to bicycle lanes as the road is getting more congested. He said he understands that the City need-ed to do something for the cyclists, but widening Albert Road would have made more sense. He felt that the decision to implement the cycle lanes was to hur-ried.

Fadia Nolan of Nolan’s Tires in Al-bert Road said the lanes have taken away much needed parking, which is al-ready a serious problem. If people start parking in the side roads, it will clash with the community.

Mr Herron said numerous public meetings were held, as well as site vis-its to engage with residents and busi-nesses about the non-motorised trans-port (NMT) project in Salt River.

Mr Herron said the City has not re-ceived any complaints with regard to the extended bicycle lanes. He said it was always communicated through the

public participation process that some parking would be removed along Albert Road, but it was done as a last resort and after assessing other alternatives. He said there is no point along Albert Road where parking is to be removed on both sides of the road.

Complaints as bike lanes replace parking

Picture left: The City’s head of transport, Brett Herron (right) in consultation with Abraham Witten of SMEC Consultants, the company contracted by the City for the construction of the bicycle lanes and the revamp of the Salt River circle. Picture right: Workers construct railings at the pedestrians exits of the circle. New road signs and street names have also been put up. .

www.woodstocklife.co.za info@woodstocklife.co.zaApril 20154

Advertorial

Pick n Pay takes Easter to local schoolLAUGHTER and excitement filled the play-ground at the Mary Kihn School for par-tially-hearing children as learners scurried across the field looking for Easter-eggs.

Observatory Pick n Pay Family Su-permarket recently celebrated Easter with the 79 learners at the local special needs school.

The store donated boxes of marshmal-low eggs for their egg hunt and donated a hamper as a prize for the school’s raffle fundraiser.

Zeenith Thomas, Pick n Pay customer

care manager, said they wanted to make Easter special for a local school and give them the opportunity to raise some money.

The Grade R to Grade 7 learners were split into five groups and raced to the playground in search of the eggs. They climbed the play equipment and rum-maged through the grass.

Mary Kihn principal Jill Wilmot said they children were very excited about the egg hunt.

She said one boy even convinced his mother to bring him to school despite the fact that he was recovering from chicken pox.

At the end of the hunt, the learners ea-gerly waited to see which group collected the most eggs.

They smiled and gestured a thank you with their hand to their chins when every learner received chocolate eggs.

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Observatory Pick n Pay customer care manager Zeenith Thomas (middle) with the children of the Mary Kihn School for partially hearing children. Pick n Pay recently donated Easter eggs for the school’s egg hunt and a hamper as a prize for the school’s raffle fundraiser.

By Aubrena ArmstrongTHE local ward councillor for Wood-stock below Victoria Road, Bernadette le Roux, recently suffered a heart at-tack and is recovering in hospital after undergoing by-pass surgery.

Proportional representative council-lor Paddy Chapple has stepped in and will be acting ward councillor for Ward 55 while Ms Le Roux recouperates.

Ms Le Roux is the ward councillor for Ward 55, which includes Wood-stock and Salt River area below Victoria Road, Century City residential, Milner-ton, Sanddrif, Paarden Eiland, Tyger-hof, Rugby, Ysterplaat and Brooklyn.

It is not clear how long Ms Le Roux will be on sick leave as her recovery might take a while, said Mr Chapple.

Ms Le Roux was recovering well from the operation and had been dis-charged from hospital. She told Wood-stockLife the operation had been suc-

cessful. Shaamiel Abbass, chair of the Wood-

stock Community Outreach Forum, which operates in the area that falls un-der Ms Le Roux’s ward, was concerned that a backlog of issues that need to be dealt with will build up in Ms Le Roux’s absence.

He said the most pressing issue that required the ward councillor’s attention at the moment is the derelict property in York Road that harbours anti-social behaviour.

Warda Rahim, chair of the Salt River Ratepayers’ Association, was less wor-ried, saying that she has worked well with Mr Chapple in the past.

“He is a very approachable person and he takes keen interest in the area because he lives in the neighbourhood,” she said.

Mr Chapple said he will be taking Ms Le Roux’s place in the full capacity of a ward councillor.

But despite her illness, Mr Chapple is positive that Ms Le Roux will contin-ue her post as ward councillor after she has recovered.

If Ms Le Roux did decide to step down as ward councillor, a by-election will be held to elect a new ward coun-cillor.

In South African local government democracy, ward councillors are di-rectly elected by the voters in a ward. Proportional representative (PR) coun-cillors, on the other hand, are indirectly elected. Before an election, each po-litical party compiles a list of PR can-didates. The number of PR candidates from each list who eventually become councillors is linked the proportion of support that each political party gets.

Ward councillor suffers heart attackBernadette le

Roux

www.woodstocklife.co.za info@woodstocklife.co.zaApril 2015 5

structures built on the railway proper-ty are not used as dwellings, says Mr Julies. A police source concurred, say-ing they were used in the manufacture of drugs.

A recent shooting in the area has worried nearby residents, who said the area is getting more dangerous.

Ms Scott said: “Prasa is concerned about the recurrence of squatters as the site has been cleared in the past in col-laboration with the City and Transnet (which owns some of the land).”

She said Prasa intends to lease the site and have approached interested parties, but nothing materialized yet.

Open gates from Albert Road and from the industrial side of Woodstock allows easy access onto the railway line. Mr Julies showed WoodstockLife an unsecured gate which was later sto-len by street harvesters. He said ad-dicts sell the material to scrap dealers to support their drug habits.

He said Prasa has locked some of the gates, but the fencing is in such a bad state that it fails to keep anyone out. Commuters have formed a habit of taking short cuts over the tracks in-stead of using the footbridges.

Ms Scott said that the purpose of railway fencing is to demarcate the boundary between the road and the railway, and not to keep people out.

“A fence would not deter wilful entry onto the rail reserves by persons with intent.” She said it is unfortunate that Prasa has to allocate resources to keep trespassers and vandals out at the cost of other priorities.

Street addicts build structures in-side and around the buildings to remain out of sight. Some of them live inside the damaged buildings, under the foot-bridges, or inside the deserted Porter Street subway (near I&J).

Ms Scott said Prasa is aware of the vagrancy on the railway, but the prob-lem is complex. “Vagrants living in rail reserves must be relocated to alterna-tive sites through a legal process. For this we rely on the City of Cape Town and Prasa CRES (Corporate Real Estate Solutions).”

Street addicts sleeping on railway property are deemed to be trespassing, but if structures are built, the situation becomes complicated.

According to a City official, if a

squatter erects a structure on private property at any time, the owner has to apply for an eviction order to have the squatters removed. The only time an owner can remove the structure is when no one occupies it. If the squat-ters are on the property for more than six months and the owner does nothing to remedy the situation, the court can order the owner to find alternative ac-commodation for the squatters.

Grim state of railway line an ‘endless battle’continued from page 1

ABDUL Boonzaaier, Woodstock resi-dent and the son of former Hard Livings gang boss Rashied Staggie, appeared in the Western Cape High Court after he was caught in possession of tik in Wright Street.

The case has since been postponed because Mr Boonzaaier’s co-accused, Zain van Wyk, wanted to plead guilty to a second charge, said his defence law-yer, Ben Mathewson.

Mr Boonzaaier was arrested in Woodstock in December and was in-itially denied bail by the magistrate’s court. He appealed this ruling and was subsequently released on bail of R50 000.

Mr Boonzaaier reportedly has at least two other pending cases against him –one for illegal possession of fire-arms and another for ammunition and possession of drugs.

For the tik case, he was granted bail because he had already been in custody for three months, which is about as long as he would have been jailed if he were found guilty for possession of tik.

According to sources in the Wood-stock Police, law enforcers are wor-ried that Mr Boonzaaier’s presence in Woodstock could cause gang activity in

the area to flare up.Mr Boonzaaier grew up in Wood-

stock and recently returned to the area after he was banned from Mannenberg as part of his bail conditions in 2013.

In the early 90s, gangsterism and drugs were rife in Woodstock, with

a different gang operating on almost every corner. Woodstock was home to feared gangs such as the Hard Livings, the Americans, the Terrible Westsiders and the Playboys.

Since the arrests of gang boss-es and the involvement of the National Prosecuting Authority’s Assets Forfei-ture Unit, gang activity in the area has died down, but a low key drug trade remained, which has recently become more brazen.

A police official, speaking to Wood-stockLife on condition of anonymity, said the presence of high-profile fig-ures associated with gangsterism does not bode well for the area. Woodstock and Salt River is already home to for-mer high-profile gangsters Sedaka Ma-datt and Rashied Staggie, Mr Boonzaa-ier’s father.

However, not everyone shares the fears expressed by the police official. A respected community leader who did not want to be named, told Woodstock-Life that he believed Mr Boonzaaier will not be a problem in Woodstock.

He said as far as he knows, there have been no complaints about Mr Boonzaaier living in the area and he doesn’t pose a threat to Woodstock.

Abdul Boonzaaier at a recent court ap-pearance.

Son of Staggie released on bail

www.woodstocklife.co.za info@woodstocklife.co.zaApril 20156

Some potholes in City’s C3 systemEVEN though the City’s response to Woodstock complaints logged onto its C3 notification by WoodstockLife has been fairly good so far, the system remains rather opaque and somewhat flawed.

Since August, WoodstockLife has logged 13 municipal defects into the City’s C3 notification system to test its efficiency and prompt residents to log defects themselves.

But testing the effectiveness of the system proved problematic as the sys-tem seems flawed.

The C3 system is the City’s work-flow tracking system through which citizens can log anything from broken pavements to security problems. Each complaint gets its own reference num-ber which can be used to track pro-gress.

But tracking the progress of a com-plaint is not as clear as it sounds.

WoodstockLife has found that com-plaints logged onto the system are often flagged as “completed” on the website before they are actually attended to.

WoodstockLife’s enquiries about these anomalies were hampered by the fact that there does not seem to be a central department or unit that over-sees the C3 system.

Each City department is responsible for managing and monitoring its own C3 notifications. For example, if a pot-hole in Plein Street is logged onto the C3 system and the roads department is

selected from the list of City functions, that notification is automatically direct-ed to the roads department, which han-dles the notification in its own way.

Some officials say a task is marked as complete on the system when re-sources and materials have been as-signed to a specific team, not when the work has actually been carried out.

Tracking a complaint through the system is complicated by the cryp-tic language used to show how far a complaint is in the system. Sometimes a complaint is flagged as “notification printed”. Apparently this means that the task has been assigned to a service team.

If the status of a complaint says “Outstanding Notification”, it apparently means that the task has not yet been

assigned to a service team.There doesn’t seem to be

a status description that in-dicates that a complaint has been assigned to a team and the resources have also been made available, but hasn’t been completed yet. City bu-reaucrats seem to have fallen into the habit of simply flag-ging such a task as “Complet-ed”, irrespective of whether it has indeed been finished.

Eventually, all the tasks logged on to the system do seem to get done, but it is dif-ficult to predict how long it will

take. Officials say it depends on the severity of the defect, its location and whether the defect is part of an existing schedule. A defect will also take longer to fix if a contractor has to be hired.

But a small heap of building rubble logged in Observatory by Woodstock-Life’s sister paper ObsLife took months to be removed.

Officials say it helps if a complaint includes the exact location of a defect, with street numbers and the contact details of the complainant.

Another flaw in the C3 system is log-ging complaints through the call centre instead of the City’s website. Wood-stockLife called the call centre to log a complaint but was diverted to at least four departments, all of whom could not help with the request.

UERA chair steps down at AGMSANDY Shepherd has stepped down as the chairperson of the University Estate Residents’ Association (UERA) at the organisation’s annual general meeting (AGM) recently held at the Al-pha School in Palmerston Road.

Ms Shepherd has been at the helm of the association since 2013 and has

now decided to step down because she has “too much on her plate”.

She said she felt like she was not doing the best she could do in the role as chairperson because of her de-manding job.

“I couldn’t do a chair role adequate-ly [and] feel comfortable myself with doing the best I can. I found that very difficult to live with,” said Ms Shep-herd.

A new chair will be elected at the next committee meeting, she said.

Ms Shepherd said crime is still a big issue in University Estate. She said an incident happens in the area every day now.

Another issue raised at the meeting was the use of lanes. She said people need to realise that they lanes are their responsibility and needs to be kept clean.

She said the AGM was a good plat-form for residents to communicate with each other.

The City’s call centre referred WoodstockLife to at least four different departments