Is the continuous increase of shack settlements a quest for shelter or economic opportunities?

Yesterday our president, S’bu Zikode, presented at a webinar on the question “Is the continuous increase of shack settlements a quest for shelter or economic opportunities?”

Friday, 24 October 2025

Is the continuous increase of shack settlements a quest for shelter or economic opportunities?

Thank you, chairperson Mr Mbili, for inviting me to speak here today. The MEC for Transport and Human Settlements, Honourable Mthombeni. My fellow respondents, Prof Lushaba, Dr Ellenson, the Portfolio Committee member Honourable Masiko, Apostle Mpungose, senior government officials present here and all participants of this webinar in KZN and beyond.

After the Prof presented his thought-provoking analysis on the question of what is considered modernity, it got me to think that government must not work for the people but with the people.

Surely, we all agree that no human being in their right senses would, out of their own personal will, choose to live in a shack. Living in a shack is dangerous, stressful, exhausting and undignified. There is a constant risk of fire, floods, and, at times, police harassment and violent evictions. Living in a flimsy home there is a much greater risk of suffering from the violence that is so common in our damaged society. Without drainage, paths and stairs shack life is lived in the mud when the rains come. Without sanitation and rubbish collection it is lived in stench and squalor, among huge rats. It is bitterly cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer. Shack life is precarious and does not allow one to build a home for one’s family, for future generations. Everything you work for can be lost in a moment.

When those in authority speak about the millions of people who live in shacks as criminals – as if this is a matter of the ‘rule of law’ – they ignore the well-known fact of our painful history of colonialism and land dispossession and apartheid that made the majority of people in this country poor. They ignore the fact that, along with the failure to undertake meaningful land reform and other forms of redress, economic policies designed in the interests of capital and the hold that a predatory political class has on the state have not only kept people poor but made the poor poorer. They ignore the fact that most young people cannot find jobs and will, unless things change, never find jobs. They ignore the fact that the few jobs that do exist are mostly to be found in cities. They ignore the fact that when people can find work it is often casual and so badly paid that it is impossible to afford formal accommodation.

The government’s housing programme after apartheid was always inadequate. The RDP houses were tiny and badly built – much worse than the township houses built under apartheid. They were often much further outside the cities than the houses built under apartheid. There was massive corruption in the building and allocation of the houses. Now that programme – as flawed as it was – has more or less collapsed. The number of houses being built has been in rapid decline for years.

The government should be undertaking rapid land reform, including in the cities. They should be engaged in a massive programme of building public housing. They should be investing in young people, investing in rural villages and small towns and taking the unemployment crisis as a crisis. They should be approaching it as if we are at war, at war against the impoverishment, hopelessness and indignity that is crushing so many young people’s hopes for their lives.

Instead they choose to criminalise poverty. They choose to send our armed and violent anti-eviction units of various kinds to destroy people’s homes. Instead of upgrading shack settlements where they are they choose to force people out of the cities and away from the new nodes of gated wealth outside the cities to human dumping grounds – wastelands that are far from schools, clinics, transport routes and opportunities for work.

Today we are asked to choose between saying that people live in shacks because they need shelter or because they need to be close to economic opportunities. This is a choice from no choice. We must refuse to make this choice. People live in shacks because they need homes and because they need to be close to economic opportunities.

Urbanisation is a global phenomenon. Migration is also a global phenomenon. More than a billion people live in shacks around the world. People migrate to cities for a number of reasons but the main motivation is the search for economic opportunities. If people find decent jobs, they will find a decent apartment or a house to live in. However, when people do not find a decent job or they cannot find any job at all, then they will be compelled to occupy land and build shacks. For as long as there is no work in rural villages and small towns people will come to the cities to look for work. For as long as they cannot find work or cannot find decent work they will not be able to afford formal accommodation. Under these circumstances they will need shelter and for many people shacks will be the only viable option.

Of course not everyone who lives in a shack comes from the rural areas. Some people move to a shack to escape an abusive relationship. Young people who have grown up in the cities sometimes move into shacks when they need to establish their own homes but cannot afford formal accommodation. For these people moving to a shack is not about being close to work, it is about having their own home.

The government used to confidently say that shack settlements would be eradicated. They first gave the date of 2010 and then they changed it 2014. The reality is that as impoverishment and inequality have worsened over the years, and unemployment has rapidly worsened, the number of people living in shacks has increased. No matter how viciously the poor are criminalised, no matter how often right-wing populist politicians claim that people living in shacks are ‘foreigners’ and no matter how violently the government responds to shack settlements there will continue to be more and more shacks unless government starts to think and act differently.

If government sends out armed units to destroy people’s homes they will just rebuild. If they cannot rebuild on the same land they will rebuild elsewhere. Government must understand that the only way to reduce the number of shacks is to provide land, housing and an economy that can give people a decent livelihood.

There must be massive investment in rural areas and small towns including the construction of infrastructure, institutions of high learning, health care centres, industries, etc. There must be a massive investment in job creation, support for those without decent work and a basic income grant. There must be a people centred economy. There must be an end to the plunder of public budgets by politically connected mafias. There must be massive urban and land reform. There should be subsidised housing for young people coming to cities. Serviced sites and subsidised access to building material should be made available for people who wish to build for themselves. Government needs to build decent public housing on a mass scale, including housing for single young people.

We cannot continue to allocate land on the basis of private profit. For as long as urban land is commodified those with no money will not be welcome. Land must be allocated on the basis of social need. In rural areas there is, at least, a large amount of land that is allocated outside of the capitalist system via versions of traditional management. We all know the problems that are sometimes present – such as the Ngonyama Trust extracting rent and women being denied access to land – but for many people these systems are more welcoming than the capitalist system in the cities.

The reality is that we live in the most productive economy in human history. There is more than enough wealth in the world to house, feed, clothe and educate everyone. South Africa is not a poor country. We could have made great strides towards ensuring a dignified life for our people – including dignified housing – with the right political vision and integrity.

The only way to ensure that nobody has to live in a shack is to build a world and a country in which land, wealth and power are fairly shared. We have to move beyond capitalism and build a humane economy, an economy that functions in the interests of the people, starting with the worst off, and not private profit. We have to put an end to the gangsterisation of politics and the massive theft of public wealth.

Shack settlements must be seen as communities to be supported, and not as issue of criminality. The government must respond with humility and care, not arrogance and violence.

We cannot continue with the situation in which the rich live in gated communities and the poor live in shacks. There is only one world, only one humanity, and everyone should be able to live in safety and with dignity.
The real problem is inequality. Shacks are just a symptom of this problem. The real solution to this problem is to build a more equal and just world, a more equal and just country and more equal and just cities.