If you want to light your cigars with $20 bills that’s up to you. After all, money is just a disposable commodity anyway.
However, I do care if you spend money doing something that is illegal or wrong.
So let’s think about an interesting dispute that’s unfolding in Cape Town and it’s typical of many similar disputes in other parts of the country too.
What happened was that a local businessman Fred Robertson, chief executive of listed black empowerment company Brimstone, decided to build himself a mansion in Bantry Bay.
There is a restriction in that suburb that sets the maximum size of a building to three storeys. But Robertson, it appears, seemed to think that such restrictions applied to other residents of the suburb and not to him. So he apparently went ahead and built his new five-storey home without bothering to get planning permission from the council at all.
As everyone in Bantry Bay knows, the limit is three storeys. Of course, Robertson’s neighbours were furious. Their properties had been devalued, their sea views destroyed and their privacy invaded. They had every right to feel aggrieved.
Robertson’s contractors apparently started work on the new home sometime last year as he ploughed tens of millions of rands into the new majestic structure in this picturesque seaside suburb.
But planning permission had not been granted by the council. Neighbours watched in apparent amazement as the building rose higher and higher as neighbourhood gossips started rumours of “political connections” and “special permission” and all sorts of other nonsense too.
Having put up the building, Robertson did what he was supposed to do in the first place. He approached the council for the necessary planning permission.
Who his advisers were at that stage remains a mystery, but I’m pretty sure somebody along the line would have advised him. So he either got very bad advice or he chose to ignore the advice he had been given.
Needless to say Cape Town Council refused to grant planning permission for a five-storey building and insisted, instead, that he remove the two offending storeys. The Ratepayers’ Association got involved too and between them took the matter to the courts.
Frankly, I support the council and the Ratepayers’ Association when it comes to enforcing the bylaws and I just wish that more and more councils would do the same thing. Why should bylaws be waived to accommodate some dude who’s loaded with loot?
Whether he lives in Cape Town or Koffiefontein.
Of course there are those who will say “if you let one resident put up a five-storey mansion then you’ll have to let everyone do so. . .”, and they’ll go on to predict that this will result in Bantry Bay being transformed into a mini Sea Point. And, in a matter of moments a truck full of alarmist Mother Grundys will appear at public meetings, predicting that Nigerian drug dealers, prostitutes, massage parlours, money launderers and all manner of other human scum will invade the suburb too if the council grants special planning permission for a five-storey building in Bantry Bay.
You can just imagine how quickly this nonsense would spiral out of control.
Anyway, the councillors are probably right in their assessment that if they grant a waiver to one resident then everyone else will apply for it too. You see, those chaps living in, or buying a house in Bantry Bay are generally pretty well-heeled, have the necessary loot to invest in “structural improvements” such as adding a couple of storeys for the hell of it. So I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if many of the houses were transformed into five-storey mansions once the building restrictions were relaxed.
Be that as it may, the current restriction is three storeys in Bantry Bay. That’s what the bylaws stipulate and that’s that.
To my mind the facts are quite simple: if you want to build a new house, you get your architect to design it for you and then submit your plans to the council for approval. If they are approved as they are, then you start building. If they need to be modified, you modify them until they meet the requirements of the council itself.
Then, clutching your approved plans tightly in your mitts, you sign a contract with a building contractor and start work. Not before and, most importantly, not the other way around.
Cities throughout the world are made up of suburbs and suburbs are nothing more than communities that live together. And when you put a lot of people together you have to have rules. That’s what councils do: set up rules for the community. And whether you like those rules or not most of you must abide by them.
But there is always some joker, somewhere along the line, who thinks that he or she is above the law and promptly does exactly what he or she wants in flagrant disregard for the restrictions that are in place. In many instances, the council or the local authority grants special permission for such illegal structures as they apparently did in Arcadia, Pretoria, where the illegal Zimbabwean embassy was granted a waiver after it had been built.
And, perhaps, that was exactly what Fred Robertson was hoping for when he started building the new mansion in Bantry Bay.
But I am entirely unsympathetic in cases such as these. I think that councils everywhere in South Africa must enforce the bylaws and if the councils are incapable of enforcing them then the Ratepayers’ Associations must step in instead.
And I’m not sorry for Fred Robertson or anyone else who flouts the bylaws for that matter.
I reckon that the right thing to do is make an example of Fred Robertson for the rest of the city (and, for that matter, the rest of the country too) by insisting that he pays to demolish the building, then submits plans for a new one and, once approved, builds it according to the plans.
Sure, it will mean that Mr Robertson will lose tens of millions of rands, but I really don’t care how he wastes or spends his money anyway.
What I do care about is the rule of law and, if the bylaws of the city have been flagrantly ignored, then my attitude is that the council must enforce them – at whatever cost.
Take a look around your suburbs and see just how many of the existing bylaws are being flouted. The South African attitude is to “turn a blind eye” or “I don’t want to make trouble” or “I don’t want to get involved” or “It’s their problem, not mine”.
And that’s one reason why all our communities are so wounded – because nobody respects the rule of law.
*Paddy Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn’t pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.
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