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FAMILY WANTS COMPENSATION, HALTS PROBASE ROAD

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KWALUSENI – Never!

A family at Kwaluseni is adamant that will not cede a portion of land to a road construction project that is part of the E1.6 billion upgrading of rural roads by Probase Eswatini.

According to the Kwaluseni Inkhundla, the Shiba homestead is the only remaining home not to have signed documentation allowing the project to use its portion of land for the road construction.

There were 14 other homestead identified as being located too close to the road, but all have relented to shifting their boundaries by at least a metre or two away from the road that is under construction.

Probase is constructing a 5.3 kilometre road from Mhlaleni to Ludzeludze and the project should have resumed if there were no dispute linked to it, according to the Kwaluseni Inkhundla.

The head of the homestead, Simphiwe Dlamini, told Eswatini News that she had removed pegs she found in her family property because no one from the inkhundla centre had engaged her on the proposed construction of the road and the intended use of her family’s piece of land.

Dlamini said she felt provoked and taken advantage of because she knew that talks were pending on the issue, yet a grader had already been dispatched to begin the work.

“I told them to stop it and got someone to remove the pegs for me. It was wrong for them to come and do the work without talks,” she said.

Dlamini said meetings had been called to discuss the issue, but nothing had been concluded.

She said one of the meetings was called while she also had commitments in Mbabane as she had personal responsibilities as the breadwinner of the family.

“I am a person with disability and thus have other commitments. I’m also doing a six months course, which makes me hardly available on weekdays. One time I was called to the Regional Administrator’s Office, where I found that there were two camps. One person told me that attending the meeting would be of no consequence to me because I will not be affected by the road. I then left as a result of that discussion,” she said.

Dlamini said she also could not come to terms with the fact that no one would refund her the money she spent on travelling to the meetings.

She said after that incident, someone told her she was needed to come and discuss the issue, but as chairperson of a disability committee, she had to go to Mbabane for a pressing issue.

Dlamini said while waiting for continued discussion on the matter, she came home one day to discover that there were three pegs right inside her family compound.

Grader

She said a councillor (bucopho) who was in the company of a grader operator, wanted to explain the issue to her. But she, however, told them that she did not want any portion of her land to be encroached into. Despite her definite stance, she said in the days that followed, a grader arrived and encroached on her family compound. She said she told the driver of the grader to stop encroaching on her land.

“This is especially annoying to me because there is no form of compensation from the project, yet my family is huge and growing,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Member of Parliament for Kwaluseni Inkhundla, Sibusiso Mabhanisi Dlamini, confirmed that the project has been halted because of the talks over the land to be forfeited to the project.

Dlamini said he was not expecting the resistance from residents because the affected portions of land was only a metre or two away from the main road.

The MP said Simphiwe was called to a meeting where the intention was to explain how the project would affect her and further hear her side of the story, but she did not attend.

The MP said roads built with the Probase technology have no compensation attached to them because they have what is known as ‘modified routine maintenance’, which is aimed at benefitting the same residents using the road.

He further said the lack of a substantive development committee at Kwaluseni was contributing to the lack of clear information meant for the residents’ understanding of such projects.

 “There are five different development committees, all clamouring for legitimacy. It is hard to work with five development committees,” he said.

On another note, the MP decried that there were some people who did not want the road construction project to succeed at Kwaluseni.

The MP further said the solution to the obstacle was to look for a way of building the road such that that it would take a narrow strip when it reached Dlamini’s homestead.

Infamous

“The road will form a bottleneck when it has reached the Shiba homestead because we do not want to be infamous for troubling people’s peace. With that resolution, the road would now continue and construction will resume in about a month’s time,” he said.

He asked those families who had given a piece of their land to the project to start removing any structures that stand in the way of the road for the construction could go ahead.

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