It is appalling and irresponsible for a lecturer at one of our most august universities to get his facts so wrong - and have the gall to publish this nonsense in a national newspaper.
Pithouse says people have been sentenced to live in Blikkiesdorp because they are poor, an idea that former minister of housing Lindiwe Sisulu got from India, where the rich have turned on the poor. This is utter rubbish.
The truth is Sisulu had nothing to do with the establishment of Blikkiesdorp.
Blikkiesdorp was the then mayor of Cape Town Helen Zille's creation to house poor people who had illegally invaded new two-bedroom homes in Delft, on the advice of one of Zille's councillors, and were then evicted.
The councillor had persuaded families living in backyards in Delft and Belhar to abandon their dwellings and take occupation of these homes before any could be allocated to "people from the Eastern Cape".
By the time these illegal occupants were evicted, by order of the high court, their previous dwellings were no longer available and they had nowhere to go.
Zille first provided marquees to house these people. But this was temporary. Blikkiesdorp was her long-term solution.
It is no wonder that the people of Blikkiesdorp turned on Zille's successor, mayor Dan Plato, slapping him in the face. These poor people, who had places to stay - crummy as the backyards of Delft and Belhar are - were manipulated by the city of Cape Town into giving up their dwellings and breaking the law, only to be consigned to Blikkiesdorp.
The blight that is Blikkiesdorp is Helen Zille's legacy, and no amount of revisionist history writing by Pithouse can change that fact.
The city of Cape Town orchestrated the biggest home invasion in South Africa's history in order to undermine the building of dignified two-bedroom homes under the N2 Gateway Project. The N2 Gateway was the city of Cape Town's target; the people of Blikkiesdorp are collateral damage.
Pithouse should be more careful. One hopes he is not allowed to get away with teaching such garbage to students of politics at Rhodes University.
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