KZN Slum Elimination Bill: A Step Back

KZN Slum Elimination Bill: A Step Back

Living in an informal settlement implies a constant struggle against forces working to eliminate one’s unauthorised and hazardous home. The most pervasive force is the constant threat of fire. It is an almost routine experience, one which residents collectively share in horror, but also with mutual assistance in the urgent rebuilding of shacks. Twelve days into the new year the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban lost 12 shacks.

Another force that shack dwellers have come to deal with routinely is violent eviction by the municipality. Here too, the response from the informal settlement residents is increasingly collective, with solidarity reaching beyond individual settlements. The experience of violence and destruction of homes has fuelled grassroots mobilisation, in particular the formation and expansion of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a Durban-based shack dwellers’ movement. In response to this mobilisation, the authorities appear to have devised a further routine, the ad hoc arrest of community leaders.

While residents understand that their poorly planned and constructed settlements are in their very nature out of balance with the forces of nature, they do not accept that they should be out of balance with a democratic dispensation, to the extent of state violence and destruction. This at a time when the national housing policy (Breaking New Ground, 2004) states the ‘need to shift the official response to informal settlements from one of conflict and neglect to one of integration and cooperation’, and has introduced a new funding mechanism for informal settlement upgrading which will ‘maintain fragile community networks, minimise disruption, and enhance participation in all aspects of the development’.

Why is national housing policy for informal settlements not being implemented in Durban? On the one hand, the eThekwini Municipality’s Integrated Housing Plan is outdated – it seeks to eliminate informal settlements by relocating shack owners who qualify for a housing subsidy to newly developed ‘RDP houses’. These are mostly in large estates nowhere near the informal settlement and are not developed in pace to address the scale of informal settlements. The approach also ignores the fact that many informal settlement residents either do not own their shacks or do not qualify for housing subsidies. This problem is redressed in Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for Developing Sustainable Human Settlements, adopted by national Department of Housing in 2004. Its Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme seeks to improve informal settlements in situ rather than relocate to new housing developments, and does not require individual households in informal settlements to qualify for a housing subsidy.

On the other hand is the anti-poor approach of the KwaZulu-Natal Province. This attitude is captured in the Province’s Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Bill, 2006, a proposed piece of legislation that makes no reference to the cooperative and participatory approach to informal settlements contained in Breaking New Ground. The Slum Elimination Bill speaks of ‘control and elimination of slums’, language used in the 1951 Prevention of Squatting Act of the apartheid government. This was replaced by the Prevention of Illegal Eviction and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act of 1998, which instead focuses on establishing rights for informal occupiers, protecting them from forceful and undignified eviction.

With the emphasis on control, the Province’s proposed Slum Elimination Bill places onus on land owners to prevent informal occupation and in cases of existing informal occupation, to institute eviction procedures. Herein lies a worrying commonality with apartheid’s 1951 Prevention Squatting Act, which, also gave a role to landowners in the ‘elimination’ of informal settlements.

In the preparations for Breaking New Ground in 2004, the national Department of Housing conceptualised ‘informal settlement support’ – much of this concept is contained in its Informal Settlement Upgrading Programme, and is in tune with the state’s overall objective of addressing poverty, vulnerability and exclusion. Within this pro-poor framework, KwaZulu-Natal’s Slum Elimination Bill should not be approved. And within this framework, living in an informal settlement should not imply a struggle against forces of elimination. It should imply government support in households’ struggle against the forces of nature – fire and floods – and in the collective struggle to access secure tenure, basic services and housing in situ, without disruption to schooling and livelihoods.

Marie Huchzermeyer
School of Architecture and Planning
Wits University