By Palesa Ndinisa
On the 26th of September 2025, the Gauteng MEC for Human Settlements, Tasneem Motara alongside MMC for Human Settlements in the City of Ekurhuleni, Kgopolo Hollo handed over title deeds to the residents of Langaville, extension 4, in Tsakane Community Hall.
In total, four (4) title deeds were issued to residents out of the ten (10) that confirmed their attendance. According to the MMC for Human Settlements, title deeds that were at their display were two thousand and seven hundred (2700) title deeds, however, because of understaffing issues and unavailability of other residents and verification of beneficiaries, only a certain number of title deeds could be handed over. “We need members of the community to also help us with the identification and the location of the beneficiaries because these are part of your neighbours and friends. It’s a long process and we work with the municipality as a department to do registrations of title deeds. We encourage people to take cake of their deeds as it is confirmation that the property belongs to them. Our intention is to issue title deeds every Friday across the Gauteng province,” expressed the MEC.
Additionally, MMC Hollo attested that title deed staff will indeed consider working on Saturdays to quicken the process of handing over title deed documents.
Speaking to Julie Thopola who is the Division Head Community Service and Relationship Management for the City of Ekurhuleni, confirmed that there were 480 title deeds at her disposal. “We did house-to-house verifications from last week Monday to confirm the owners of the title deeds. We managed to visit about 130 households, we confirmed 10 households that were available to receive their title deeds. Unfortunately, 75 people were not found, meaning some of them were probably at work, on holiday or no longer residing there. We identified 7 illegal sales of houses, which implies that we as the city allocated a house to a beneficiary, however, that beneficiary sells the house before the eight (8) year period- there is a clause in the title deed that states that a beneficiary can only sell a house after an eight year period. This is dangerous because the house will always be under the original owner’s name. We identified 28 deceased persons, 13 houses are occupied by tenants and one house had wrong information that we need to rectify on our end,” concluded Thopola.
The MMC of the city, Kgopolo Hollo urged residents to refrain from selling their homes illegally as this caused significant delays and complications.
