http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Article.aspx?id=763827

Housing delivery has ground to a halt in certain parts of South Africa — all because of a bitter tug-of-war over municipal land.

Despite a massive housing backlog of more than two million units, municipalities are holding on to millions of hectares of prime commonage land — which is supposed to be used to assist local residents — or have already sold it to private developers despite a countrywide moratorium on such land sales, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has told Business Times in an exclusive interview.

Sisulu said that t ens of thousands of hectares suitable for affordable housing may have been lost this way, a problem caused largely by a combination of soaring land values and dwindling council revenues. And in many cases the municipalities are selling the land under dubious circumstances.

Huge tracts of land in rural municipalities are also lying idle due to unresolved land claims, she said.

The situation has prompted urgent talks between the departments of housing, land affairs, public works and the Treasury, with several key legislative changes in the pipeline to stop the municipal land grab — and to bring maverick officials into line. “Somehow the state has tied itself up into so many binds that it is unable to move with the speed with which it should move,” Sisulu said.

Commonage land was granted to municipalities decades ago free of charge subject to stringent title-deed conditions for use for local residents.

In a frank appraisal of national housing delivery, Sisulu listed several other major obstacles which include:

# There is still no complete public land asset register, which means the three spheres of government do not know how much land they have and may be available for housing or land reform;

# Housing costs have rocketed due to the high price of cement and steel caused by the ongoing construction of the country’s 2010 World Cup soccer stadiums;

# Massive areas of municipal commonage in Limpopo are tied up in land claims now before the Land Claims Commission; and

# Parastatals such as Transnet are sitting on vast tracts of land that cannot be transferred to the housing department because of legal complications.

The Minister’s comments coincide with this week’s tabling in Parliament of the Housing Development Agency Bill, which paves the way for a government housing body to buy, sell, hold and expropriate land for housing development. The agency would, in conjunction with the provinces, also monitor municipalities and sanction those selling land to the private sector without the housing minister’s permission, Sisulu said.

She said this had become necessary due to the failure of a 2005 voluntary moratorium on the sale of municipal land: “They (the municipalities) just haven’t responded (to the moratorium),” Sisulu said, adding that land sales had in fact peaked shortly after the moratorium was put in place.

“We’ve lost out a number of times on this, which is why we’ve decided to take a very aggressive stand, because it’s a short-term gain that municipalities have and a long-term spatial disaster that we’re sitting with.”

An additional problem was the rate at which housing beneficiaries were selling their new homes and moving back into informal shacks, thereby adding to the delivery backlog: “It’s like putting water into a bucket and not plugging the leak,” Sisulu said, adding that new legislation would address the problem.

Sisulu’s comments follow several controversies involving commonage land in municipalities including Hermanus, George, Stellenbosch and Ekurhuleni.

The Stellenbosch council recently ordered the continuation of a far-reaching audit into the status of 1700ha of commonage land, believed to be worth almost R2-billion, some of which was sold to developers to create luxury golf resorts and dished out to white commercial farmers on 50-year leases.

Housing experts this week said municipal commonage should be ceded to the housing department free of charge, because the Constitution said that the “history of acquisition” should determine the amount of financial compensation.

The same principle applied to parastatal land, experts said.

Kobus Pienaar, spokesman for the Legal Resources Centre, said: “In cases where land was granted free of charge to municipalities, it doesn’t make sense that they should sell it off for the purposes of more golf courses.”

He said that land granted free of charge for the benefit of the community should also not be subject to land claims.

“The municipality should be making this land available for the benefit of its residents while retaining ownership. Once you transfer a piece of the commonage off, you effectively wave it goodbye,” Pienaar said.

Sisulu said that, in future, housing officials would work closely with land affairs to speed up land acquisition for housing.

Once suitable land was secured, the new Housing Agency could more effectively initiate and monitor public- private partnerships.

A case in point was the transfer of municipal land from the Cape Town Council for the development of the N2 Gateway project outside the city. “It took a year for the city to transfer the land to us, a year in which the principle developer, First National Bank, could not move forward,” Sisulu said.

The biggest problem was the ‘‘tedious processes” that people had to go through to get land. This could take up to three years, she said.