Mercury, page 5, March 6, 2007
‘Building 2.4m Units By 2014 Will Need a Miracle’
HOUSING TARGET IS UNREALISTIC, SAY OFFICIALS
Carvin Goldstone
South Africa would have to build 2.4 million houses – or about 30 000 started homes a month – if it wanted to complete its low-cost housingFprogramme by the target date of 2014. However government officials are now admitting that this target is unrealistic.
S’bu Gumede, Chariman of the eThekwini Municipality’s housing subcommittee, said yesterday that South Africa was not doing enough to meet its goal of housing the country’s poorer communities by 2014.
He told politicians and officials at a housing subcommittee meeting that the city Housing Department might need to build twice as many houses every year if it planned to meet its goal in the next seven years.
He said that, nationally, 2.2 million houses had been built over the last 14 years at 200 000 a year but that there was still a backlog of 2.4 million.
“If we have built 2.2 million in 14 years, then we will need another 14 years to build the next 2.4 million houses. But our target is only seven years away, so we will need nationally to double our performance to about 400 000 or 500 000 houses a year,” he said. The council is building 16 000 homes a year but may now be required to build 32 000 a year.
eThekweni had set its own housing goal at 2010 but, Gumede said, this also seemed “far-fetched” and it would “require a miracle” to fulfil this target.
Department head Cogie Pather said…the department would also be under pressure to build bigger houses for the poor. Presently, the municipality builds 30 square meter houses but might have to increase this to between 32 and 40 square meter houses.
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Councillors inspected some of 1 330 new houses that had been built in Umlazi among the shacks. The campaign, which began in 2005, aims to replace informal housing with basic starter homes without unduly displacing communities and families. In previous years, shack dwellers have complained that although they received new homes they were often so far away from their work and schools that they were forced to almost start their lives over again.
Comment
This article is quite significant. For years Abahlali have been told by Mlaba, Sutcliffe etc that they have no right to protest because houses are being built and the ‘slums will be cleared by 2010’. Sutcliffe has often gone on to state that ‘nowhere else in the world are governments building houses for their people’ ignoring the fact that his housing policy is strikingly similar to that of the apartheid government which also moved people out of shacks in and near the cities and dumped them in formal townships outside the cities….
Abahlali has always said that basic maths shows the city’s claim that it will eradicate shacks by 2010 to be wildly impossible. For pointing out that the Emperor is naked they have been called liars and subject to all kinds of threats. In one instance the top officials in the Dept of MEC for Housing interrupted a meeting to allege that someone who had pointed out in a newspaper article that the city could not ‘clear the slums by 2010’ was therefore a ‘spy’ working for a ‘foreign government bent on destabilizing the ANC’. That kind of language, along with all the paranoid and often racist third force language, has justified the (illegal) banning of Abahlali marches, arrests, beatings and even, twice, having the police physically prevent them from appearing in the media. Not to mention the police murder in Siyanda late last year.
Now the state has admitted that it cannot, at the rate at which it is building houses, ‘clear the slums’ by either the national target of 2014 or the eThekwini target of 2010. The Municipality are now finally admitting what Abahlali have always said – which is something which any primary school child with a knowledge of basic arithmetic or a calculator could have worked out in a minute – is in fact the truth. The city’s admission is hardly news in the sense that everybody except them who cared to think about this matter knew it already. But this public break with their previously fanatical denialism and hubris with regard to their housing policy is important in one crucial respect. That is that since Abahlali began its struggle in March 2005 they have been told that there can be no investment in any of the settlements in Durban because it will be a waste as they will ‘all be cleared by 2010’. This hasn’t been much comfort to people who, like Nonhlanhla Mzobe from Kennedy Road, have lived their whole lives (in her case more than 30 years) in ‘temporary’ settlements. Just two weeks ago the notorious Councillor Yakoob Baig was using this very line to try and stop a tiny step forward in Kennedy Road.
Claiming that there can be no development in temporary settlements to excuse the abandonment of the poor by the left arm of the municipality (the right arm, in the form of the police, is of course there to enforces Sutcliffe’s illegal march bans etc) has enabled the city authorities to cease the provision of electricity altogether (in 2002), to radically reduce access to water and sanitation, to withhold refuse removal and to refrain from other kinds of investments – roads, paths, halls, fields, creches, clinics, gardens, telephone lines, drains etc. This absolute and brutal refusal to invest in shack settlements while simultaneously investing in all kinds of ridiculous projects like the themepark, casinos, the stadium etc has led to enormous suffering and, very often, avoidable deaths with regular shack fires being the most dramatic instance of the human costs of this abandonment of the actually existing poor in the name of future development. The city can no longer use the excuse that ‘the slums will be cleared by 2010’ to justify their more or less complete exclusion of shack dwellers from access to the most basic services that the state provides to make city life viable for the rest of us. Now that they have admitted that their policy will not deliver the poor out of shack settlements and into formal townships by 2010 or even 2014 they have no excuse for refusing to develop new services in shack settlements and for scaling back existing services. They need to account for situations where a thousand people share one tap or one toilet etc, etc, etc. They can no longer dismiss this as ‘temporary’ and claim that the poor will inherit in the earth, or at least a leaking cracking matchbox house in a new township, in 2010.
Of course there are other obvious problems with the city’s statements as recorded here. Firstly, as the journalist notes, the issue is not only whether or not houses are being built but also, crucially, where those houses are being built. The city are, as they note here, now sometimes upgrading instead of always relocating, but upgrades happen in Umlazi. They don’t happen in Pinetown or Reservoir Hills or Clare Estate. If your shack is in a former township it may be upgraded. If it is in a former white or Indian suburb you still face relocation. There is very little willingness to oppose the racial and class prejudices of the rich and zero willingness to oppose the interests of big landowners like Moreland. Secondly there is the issue of the quality of the houses which is often so abysmal that people call them formal jondolos. Thirdly there is the fact that the city’s housing list is developed on the basis of ‘one house for one shack’ ignoring the fact that in many instances people from 2, 3 or 4 families occupy one shack. Currently when they relocate the people on the list are moved out and the rest, in casual violation of South African law, are just left homeless on the side of the road. The number of people needing housing is actually far, far larger than the number that they estimate with their ‘one shack – one house’ policy and it is growing all the time. Fourthly there is the fact that they are still building townships – apartheid housing policy is hardly the model to be emulated. And there is the rampant corruption in the allocation of housing and in the building…. But all this has been noted before. Read the article. It is a step forward. Sutcliffe, Mlaba, Naidoo, Gumede etc have had to let the cloak of their denialism drop a little. It’s not the prettiest sight but at least they’ll now have to engage with reality a little more.