Housing Indaba, Bolivia Lodge, Polokwane
20 November 2007
Executive Mayor of Capricorn District
Mayors from other municipalities
MEC for Local Government and Housing
Traditional leaders
Head of Department
Practitioners in the housing industry
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Theme: Towards integrated Sustainable Human Settlements
It gives us great pleasure to take part in this most important Housing
Indaba in our province. Just last month, the United Nations (UN) celebrated
World Habitat Day, an important day aimed at reflecting on the state of human
settlements and the basic right to adequate shelter for everyone all over the
world. Here in our own country, and indeed in our province, housing is and
continues to be at the forefront of the agenda for social delivery. Since 1994,
our government has taken the responsibility for providing houses to all.
Way back in 1955, the people of our country gathered in Kliptown to adopt
the Freedom Charter which provided a framework for the kind of South Africa
they wished to live in. One of the clauses they adopted was one which says that
"our people shall be provided with Houses, Security and Comfort". The clause
goes further to say: "All people shall have the right to live where they
choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and
security; Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs will be built where all
have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres;
Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up
families shall be repealed".
Before this vision was spelled out, it was some kind of an accepted norm
that blacks belonged to the reserves and the township ghettos, whilst whites
belonged to the cities and affluent suburbs. The apartheid government invested
heavily, where the white man lived and seriously neglected the so-called black
reserves and the townships. This resulted in per-capita spending becoming much
skewed in favour of white areas. Provinces like ours which had a few white
population were not spared the wrath of this policy; hence we are largely
underdeveloped due to this skewed fiscal allocation of the past. To a larger
extent, this explains the huge backlogs we still have in almost all areas of
infrastructural development including housing.
Our backlogs and disparities are not difficult to see. All of us know that,
almost all of the formerly white areas have had well-kept roads, up market
malls, clean suburbs, sports grounds, town halls, clean water and electricity.
Black townships and rural areas on the other hand, are the direct opposite of
this. They have dusty roads, are crime infested, have open sewerages and in
some cases have neither water nor electricity.
This is the legacy we have inherited from the past, and all spheres of our
government have an enormous role to play in reversing it. As a result of this
legacy, we know that, most of our municipalities started from a low base in
tackling these challenges. We know for a fact that the things that were always
taken for granted in white areas like sanitation, access roads, clinics, sports
ground facilities and housing are still major challenges in most parts of our
province, hence our government's intervention in tackling them. In response to
the challenge of housing in particular, the Provincial Growth and Development
Strategy (PGDS) has set targets to reduce congested accommodation and also to
eradicate informal settlement. This has seen about 161 206 housing units being
completed to date since the current government came into existence in 1994.
Important as this milestone is, we have since realised that this delivery
has largely been about chasing numbers, hence the shift now is no longer about
just constructing houses, but also about creating sustainable communities.
Our democratically elected government has adopted a policy known as Breaking
New Ground (BNG) which seeks to integrate our communities and break the
apartheid settlement patterns. The plan includes amongst others, revision of
subsidies; the extension of rental housing; deepening partnerships between
government and the private sector, and the eradication of informal
settlements.
This is being done in ways that reaches the poor and build integrated and
viable communities. The policy is also aimed at reconfiguring the apartheid
human settlement patterns, i.e. where whites and the rich live near places of
business and work; while black people and the poor live far from places of work
and mainstream economic activity.
Programme director
Our economy is growing and business confidence is continually increasing,
thereby generating unprecedented flows of investments in certain parts of the
province. Rapid urbanisation is moving in tandem with this growth. However,
some of the challenges that are inherently linked to the challenge of
delivering housing in this context, relates to the question of poverty
alleviation, access to land for housing development, protection of housing
beneficiaries from sub-standard work, eradication of corruption or the
possibility thereof, the normalisation of the housing market to create a single
residential property market, and finally the realisation of assets, out of
these houses.
We also remain alive to the question of housing affordability, especially
for the so-called "gap market" or middle income earners; i.e. teachers, nurses,
police etc, which is increasingly becoming a growing concern for the province.
We know for instance, that many of them are steeped in debts which reduce their
eligibility to access and refinance housing loans. This is why we have put
aggressive plans in place to address the plight of this segment of the housing
market in such places as Mokopane and here in Polokwane.
We have initiated projects such as the Bendor Ext 100, Ba-Phalaborwa Ext 7,
Mokopane Ext 20 and the Lephalale Mega-projects, in order to ensure that our
communities are able to access shelter in areas they would otherwise not be
able to afford, because of huge costs associated with land markets and building
materials.
Another challenge which we all know, relates to the perceived poor quality
of the houses we build for our people. As we travel and meet with communities
throughout the province, communities complain that the government initiated
houses are of poor quality and not durable. Key complaints pertain to flimsy
roofs, thin walls, cracks in walls, weak doors, as well as the generally poor
state of these houses. We are confident that the Department and its
stakeholders will do all it takes to arrest this general trend of shoddy work
and poor workmanship in the delivery of housing.
We already feel encouraged by the progress which is taking place regarding
the completion of so-called blocked projects. We are at-least excited to know
that significant progress has been achieved in this respect, and a total of
8495 incomplete units will be completed by the end of March 2008. In order to
resuscitate value in the current dead housing assets found in the majority of
our urban communities, a concerted effort is also being made to fast track the
registration and transfer of houses in terms of the extended discount benefit
scheme. In an effort to enhance the capacity of our municipalities to deliver
housing, all our municipalities will shortly be assisted with the development
of credible housing chapters in their Integrated Development Plans (IDPs).
Programme director
The importance of partnerships in the housing delivery value chain cannot be
overemphasised. Government alone cannot address the housing challenge on its
own. We obviously need the participation of the independent developers, the
business community, banks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and State
Owned Enterprises (SOE).
In the long run, we must appreciate the fact that our strategy will change
the landscape of our towns and cities for the better. There can be no doubt
that sustainable integrated human settlement would have a major impact in
transportation planning, energy supply and general infrastructural development.
Our housing programmes will have to focus not only on construction of houses,
but also in providing amenities such as access roads, water, electricity,
schools, clinics, playgrounds, civic centres and places of worship. At the end
of the day, owning a house must mean, much more than owning a structure of
bricks and mortar. It must mean owning an asset. A house must be a source of
pride and joy for the owner. It must provide a sense of security and comfort.
And lastly, owning a house, must give everybody, including the poor, an
opportunity to create wealth through leveraging of assets.
Let us use this conference to advance closer to our vision of building a
truly non-racial and democratic society in our lifetime.
I wish this conference every success in its deliberations!
I thank you.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Limpopo Provincial Government
20 November 2007
