Residents withholding vote because of rape scourge

Some residents of Nkandla in Limpopo say they will not be voting because women are being raped and no one has come to their aid.[VIDEO]

Seshego - Some residents of a small informal settlement called Nkandla outside Seshego in Limpopo say they will not be voting because women are being raped and no one has come to their aid.

Young men told Independent Media that women were being raped in nearby bushes where they had to go to the toilet because they had no bathrooms in their homes.

The community was relocated from another area not too far from where they were resettled in 2013 after they were promised free houses.

In January this year residents staged violent protests over perceived discrimination in the allocation of RDP houses, while they were left at the settlement on the side of the Nelson Mandela Drive between Polokwane and Seshego.

The settlement, which is also referred to as Disteneng, does not have running water, tarred roads and sanitation among other services.

There was also no voting station in the area, with residents having to cross the main road to a school in Ward 78.

Thirty-one-year-old Dumi Mathumo said they were tired of living in terrible conditions, and had given up all hope of politicians coming to their rescue.

“This is an old place. We have been here for five years, but after we were elsewhere for 15 years. People qualified for houses but their stickers were taken away and allocated to other people who got houses. We have serious problems here,” he said.

Residents say the informal settlement was named after Nkandla because of all the housing-related issues they were experiencing they wanted to demonstrate the extreme opposites in how people lived in the country.

President Jacob Zuma has come under fire from many South Africans for what they believe is his luxurious homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal.

Elections Bureau