Govt says it is delivering on homes

As police evicted the last of about 2,000 people who occupied a stretch of land in Gauteng, the South African government defended itself on Friday against accusations that it has neglected its poor and homeless.

The government has come under fire from civic organisations and opposition politicians in the past week for the tough stand it has taken against the squatters who moved in on the land in Bredell just over a week ago. Pan African Congress (PAC) officials charged the invaders about US $3 for a small plot each on the land. The government was granted an eviction order in the High Court and began demolishing about 1,200 hastily-built shacks on the privately-owned land on Thursday.

Nkoana Maloka, acting head of housing and community development services for the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council, told IRIN on Friday that a total of more than half a million people were still waiting for houses in Gauteng. He said the housing backlog in the Ekurhuleni municipality, where Bredell is situated, was over 125,000.

In a statement earlier, he said: “The government wishes to reiterate that it is fully aware of and sympathetic to the plight of homeless and landless people in Gauteng. It is within this context that the government has developed comprehensive strategies and processes to address these problems ... Whilst implementing a fast-track delivery process, however, the government must ensure that this is done in an equitable manner that is just and fair to the many people living in desperate circumstances throughout the province.”

These sentiments were echoed by Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa during a media briefing late on Friday. “We’ve got half a million people on our housing waiting list. We will not give preference to a thousand people simply because they invade land,” he was quoted saying.

Maloka said the human tragedy flowing out homelessness had prompted the government to initiate several housing projects over the past six years, contrary to accusations that the government was “doing nothing” to provide houses and services to the poor. In the Ekurhuleni municipality alone, he said, more than 60,000 houses had been developed under project-linked subsidy schemes in the past six years. In addition, more than 44,000 service sites were released to the homeless and another 40,000, on which people live, were serviced in terms of the Essential Services Programme. Ten thousand more houses had been developed through two other programmes, he added.

In total the municipality had spent more than US $213 million on providing these houses and service sites, his statement said. “During the next financial year, a total of (US $39.3 million) has been earmarked for a range of housing projects in the region,” he added.

Maloka said the government was aware that in many instances housing allocation was slow and complex, but that it was important to verify the bona-fides of beneficiaries of government subsidies. For example, he said, it was clear that some of the people who invaded the land in Bredell, had either benefited from government housing subsidies in neighbouring townships before, or were already on the government’s waiting lists. He said that while a comprehensive study had not yet been done, “on the basis of the receipts which were issued by the illegal land sellers, we established that indeed some of the people might have benefited from housing schemes in neighbouring townships and that others were still on our waiting lists”.

The government has moved many times in the past few years to evict illegal land invaders around Gauteng. However, the involvement of the PAC this time created international publicity and put South Africa’s huge housing backlog in the spotlight. Also, while the government tried to assure the western world that it did not share Zimbabwe’s land problems and that it would not allow anarchy to prevail, analysts said it sent a clear message to the homeless that it would not be deflected from its own policies, even if people had to wait longer for their houses.