Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act, 1998

Good grief.

Now, Costa was also denied access to inspect alleged defects and complained of unauthorized subletting, so she gave written notice and, um, Costa applied then under Section 4[1] of the PIE Act to have the first respondent, her spouse, and other occupiers evicted.

Now, um, interestingly, the respondent's principal defense was that the Consumer Protection Act governed the lease, with the consequence that Section 14 required 20 business days' notice before cancellation, and they attacked Costa's shorter notice as invalid.

So the decisive CPA question was whether Costa supplied the rental property in the ordinary course of business.

It provides for such a right, you know.

So there's the PIE Act, which is the Prevention of Egoic Occupation.

So this came because landlords would abuse their powers when it came to dealing with tenant disputes.

So that is why it is.

We're talking about 3,200 informal settlements recorded nationally and a housing backlog of approximately 2.3 million homes according to Stats SA and the Human Sciences Research Council.

For a clearer picture of all of this, we need to understand the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from Unlawful Occupation of Land Act, commonly known as the PIE Act.

Schindler's attorneys, Chantel Gladwin Wood and Anya van Wyk, explain that this law essentially means that no one can be forcibly removed from a property without a court order.

Okay, sharp.

It's useful to understand that this applies whether someone invaded vacant land or stayed their lease or simply stopped paying rent and wouldn't leave.

The thing here is the PIE Act doesn't grant ownership rights to squatters.

It just makes the eviction process incredibly complex, like in Johannesburg CBD.

Property owners must follow six strict steps: issue a notice to vacate, approach the court if occupiers don't leave, serve the notice of motion through the sheriff, attend a court hearing where factors like vulnerability of occupiers, all of those things are considered, wait for the eviction order to see if it's granted, and then finally have the sheriff execute the eviction.

If we want justice, we have to look at the state of our democracy and say, what are the things that are not working in it? What are the institutional guardrails that are now required? And this is especially key because we are seeing attacks on some of the legislative protections we have.

Just to give you a little bit of an example, our Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act, right, is currently under attack.

This is one of the most important pieces of legislation that came into effect post apartheid, right? And so that tells us that about the current climate is not just about migrants, but also stripping away some very hard-won rights.

How do we protect what works, let go of what doesn't, and imagine and bring into life something that is visionary, something we can collectively rally around, and something that we can work for in our localities, connecting with each other community by community in the society.