Fire church in land grabbing scandal
Mpho Mokwape | Monday May 26, 2014 16:19
Now the Fire church, known as World Community Counselling Centre (WCC), owned by a foreign pastor, has allocated itself a huge stretch of land approximately measuring 2kms by 1 km at Metlhabeng area, which it began fencing recently. On Saturday when The Monitor team sought to speak to the pastor, his church stewards arrogantly said he had gone to heaven.
The fenced chunk of land paradoxically has about 50 households and several undeveloped plots, as well as a new gravel road recently developed by the Tlokweng council for the households there.
The Monitor team was alerted to the new development of the miracle working church by an affected resident who finds herself fenced all around by the church’snew giant fence.
“The church is now in charge of this area and anytime they feel like expanding their structure they do so without even consulting us the neighbours and I doubt if the land board is involved when all this is happening,” said one disgruntled resident.
Upon arriving at the church The Monitor team had an unpleasant welcome with one church steward, a foreign national identifying himself as the church representative, telling us that the media is not allowed within its premises as they have their own media personnel and that the church handles its own publicity.
Questioned on the recent erection of the fence enclosing hundreds of residential plots the church representative said the area belongs to the Matlapeng family and that the church chipped in to help with the fencing material and logistics.
“The family approached us to help them with the material and we just did that, we are not influencing them in anyway to claim the land,” said the church representative.
He said the church plot belongs to the family and that they (the church) now own it legitimately and stressed that they strictly dealt with the family in acquiring the land and not the land board. The Matlapeng family also refused to be drawn into discussing the matter saying that the family spokesman was not available.
The church was registered in 2006. It started operating from its current location from 2009 and has now grown to be one of the most talked about miracle churches, owning its own free to air television channel.
Meanwhile the community who said that they have been legitimately allocated plots by the land board around the years of 2003 and 2004 are now reeling in shock as to how the church, being led by a foreign pastor, can have so much power over such a vast area of land.
One of the residents in the area told The Monitor that they have never heard of land belonging to a certain family as they were allocated the plots by the Land Board until 2010 when they received documents from the Matlapeng family informing them that they should stop developing their plots as the land belongs to the family and not the land board.
“The family told us that the letter was from their lawyers and that it is simply informing us not to do anything on their land but many of us had already had structures in our plots and we figured out that if it has anything to do with the land, the issue should be taken to the land board not us,” said the resident.