Court Orders Ekurhuleni To Rebuild Benoni Settlement After SANDF Demolitions Left Hundreds Homeless
- The Gauteng High Court has ordered the City of Ekurhuleni to allow hundreds of families to return to the N12 informal settlement in Benoni
- This comes after their homes were torn down during a military-backed operation in May 2026
- Judge Stuart Wilson found that the City had no court order permitting the evictions and had failed to justify the wholesale destruction of the settlement
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GAUTENG, BENONI - Hundreds of families who watched their homes get flattened during a military-backed operation in Benoni last month have won the right to return, after the Gauteng High Court stepped in and ordered the City of Ekurhuleni to undo the damage.
Between 6 and 15 May 2026, residents of the N12 informal settlement, also known as Albert Luthuli informal settlement, saw their homes demolished as part of Operation Prosper, a government initiative that deployed 550 South African National Defence Force soldiers in Gauteng to tackle illegal mining. Around 2 000 people were left without shelter.
What went wrong
The demolitions raised serious legal questions from the start. Some of the residents at N12 had been placed there specifically because of a Constitutional Court ruling in 2011, which found that their earlier eviction from land in Bapsfontein was unlawful and ordered that the families be temporarily settled at the N12 site.
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Permanent housing was supposed to follow, but never did. Fifteen years later, those same families found themselves homeless again.
Judge Stuart Wilson, who heard the urgent application brought by the South African Human Rights Commission on 12 June 2026, was direct in his findings. He said the City had not been able to produce any court order allowing the evictions and could not point to anything that gave police or soldiers the legal authority to demolish homes without one.
He also noted that the presidential proclamation behind Operation Prosper had stated that soldiers were to return to barracks by the end of April, raising the question of why they were still at the settlement in May.
The human cost of the demolitions was significant.
What the court ordered
The interim order prevents any more demolitions at the settlement while allowing police and the military to continue entering the area to deal with illegal mining activity and seize equipment.
The City of Ekurhuleni's city manager and mayor were made personally responsible for carrying out the court's instructions and must report back to the court by mid-July on progress made.
The municipality was also ordered to cover the legal costs of the application. Judge Wilson made clear he would continue supervising the case, saying the respondents appeared to have committed serious violations of rights and may be in contempt of the 2011 Constitutional Court ruling.
Source: Getty Images
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Source: Briefly News
