media on several issues
4 July 2007
The Department of Local Government and Housing wishes to provide an update
to the media on several issues of importance within the department of local
government and housing.
We are working hard to transform the local government sector and the housing
industry in the province in order to position ourselves to be able to
accelerate service delivery in line with the provincial growth and development
strategy (PGDS) and other attendant strategies like the Five Year Local
Government Strategic Agenda as well as the New Housing Strategy, Breaking New
Ground.
As a way of improving the capacity of municipalities in order to make the
sphere of local government to work better we are rolling amongst others the
following interventions:
Five year strategic agenda
We are in the second year of implementing the five year local government
strategic agenda, and already there are signs of improvement within
municipalities in terms of how they have dealt with their Integrated
Development Plans (IDPs) and budgeting for the 2007/08 financial year. More and
more stakeholders, sector departments and business have taken part in the IDP
review process of municipalities.
We will continue this year to implement various programmes in order to build
the capacity of municipalities, deal with issues of financial viability,
infrastructure development, roll out the property rates act, better spatial
planning and land use.
Building capacity for local government
We are reviewing the organograms of municipalities to ensure that
institutional structures are relevant to the implementation of IDPs for
accelerated service delivery.
We are committed to ensuring that all key positions in our municipalities
are filled, namely municipal manager, technical manager, planning managers and
chief financial officer. We constantly review the capacity of municipalities in
terms of their engineering capacity, town planning capacity and financial
capacity. To this end we continue to second experts to municipalities with
capacity constraints through Project Consolidate.
Infrastructure development and investment for service delivery
For the coming three years we will be spending over R3,6 billion through the
municipal infrastructure grant, over R1 billion for rural electrification and
over R600 million for municipal support, township establishments and site
demarcations. We have to co-ordinate over R4 billion over and above other
budgets by parastatals and sector departments to enhance municipal
infrastructure and service delivery.
Most of our towns are experiencing infrastructural constraints, given that
infrastructure is old and the existing capacity can not deal with the current
growth. It should be noted that any infrastructure, e.g. water, sanitation and
electricity can only carry certain loads, be it kiloliters or kilowatts.
Given the massive rural sanitation backlog in the province, we are
investigating alternative innovative technologies as a replacement to the pit
latrines. We are also going to use the Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP)
approach to ensure that we involve many of the beneficiaries in the actual
projects implementation so that we can maximize delivery.
Several dams being commissioned or completed will go a long way in ensuring
bulk availability of water in some of our fastest growing towns like Makhado,
Tzaneen, Polokwane, Tubatse and Lephalale. There is a bulk supply upgrade
planned for linking Polokwane and Flag Boshielo Dam which will ease supply
pressures to our capital city.
Financial viability
We continue to assist municipalities with revenue enhancement strategies so
that more revenue can be collected to increase available resources for service
delivery. As part of this we will be assisting municipalities to implement the
Property Rates Act through development of valuation rolls, aerial photography,
by laws and rates policies.
The creation of integrated and sustainable human settlements is a
cornerstone of our strategy. A municipality working well with sector
departments, parastatals, business and communities will lead to flourishing
communities.
Developing capacity in the housing sector
In order for us to be able to deliver on our mandate of integrated and
sustainable human settlement we need to ensure that the housing industry is
ready and geared for delivery. The sector is competing with other sectors like
roads and transport, energy and telecommunication, for materials, contractors,
plants and equipment. So we need to ensure that brick manufactures are ready
for the demand by expanding their production capacity. Similarly we need to
deal with the challenge around cements supply, especially with regard to
uncertainty in price escalations.
Municipalities must have housing chapters in their IDPs, clearly serviced
land for human settlements and well managed beneficiary register and waiting
lists.
We have reviewed our contracting strategies to have a mixture of high
capacity developers (well established developers) as well as the emerging
contractors. We are improving our contract and project management capability,
housing subsidy information system, payments systems and better dissemination
of housing information to communities through amongst others the recently
established Housing Consumer Call Centre (0800NTSHEBELE/0800 687 432).
Spatial restructuring and the property market.
The current property market development is leading to vast separation
between the middle and high income groups and the lower income groups in terms
of spatial development as well as price market barriers. Most of the housing
for the poor is developing in the periphery of the townships away from the city
centre, whereas housing for the rich is in the opposite direction.
Through spatial restructuring and better land use planning we should be able
to turn the situation around. We are working closely with municipalities to
identify strategically located land in order to develop integrated and
sustainable settlements. Already we are making progress in Polokwane,
Lephalale, Makhado, Phalaborwa and other municipalities will follow.
We are committed to ensuring that we also break the market barriers created,
which have led to many of the emerging middle income earners not having access
to housing in towns. This we will do by partnering with municipalities, banks
and other financial institutions and private developers.
Housing delivery plan
We plan to spend over R2,5 billion in the coming three years in the province
to create homes for families in sustainable communities. As we create
integrated and sustainable human settlements we are working with other sector
departments to ensure that other social and economic amenities are also created
like schools, clinics, sporting facilities, etc.
We plan to build over 42 000 housing units with the allocated budget over
the coming three years. Together with our partners we should be able to provide
more housing but ensure that we build sustainable human settlements.
Blocked projects and incomplete houses
We have committed R331 million for the 2007/08 financial year to build 8 495
in order to deal with blocked projects so that we are able to deal with those
houses which have been left incomplete over the years. Over and above
commitments for this year we will build a further 20 617 houses in the other
two later years of the medium expenditure framework (MTEF).
In order to plan ahead and ensure that we do not commit mistakes of the past
we needed to assess our backlogs, our past performance, current
commitments.
At the beginning of the financial year our financial commitments were higher
than available financial resources. This had to be explained in clear financial
and budgetary terms and information management systems had challenges.
Another challenge was that in 2 000 contractors allocated to do housing were
diverted to deal with flood relief housing projects and this might have led to
double allocation of the same budget, namely to disaster and the ordinary
houses.
As I joined the Department it became immediately apparent that there are
challenges around information management systems, records management, internal
controls and financial reporting. We needed to establish a much more scientific
analysis of the status quo, what we may call some due diligence. We needed to
know who was paid how much and for what services within housing. This was
necessary to assist with reporting and accountability.
We were also conscious of the decision by the national Department of Housing
which has mandated the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), as per proclamation R7
of 2007 signed by the President on 25 April 2007, to conduct investigation into
the delivery of low cost housing from 1994 to date. The investigation will
focus on loss of state funds allocated to low cost housing schemes,
mismanagement or misuse of the State's low cost housing scheme and conduct of
officials, employees and or municipal councillors resulting in losses of lack
of control over housing subsidy scheme and or property.
We therefore took a decision to engage the services of Price Water House
Co-operas and SAB&T to do forensic investigations on our housing
projects.
The audit we have done came with a number of recommendations namely, the
need for a physical verification of houses build, improved records management,
need to improve planning and budgeting for housing, better project management
and payment systems.
The recommendations further allude to the fact that the department should
consult legally to determine possible disciplinary action against implicated
officials.
Moving forward the SIU, will continue with their investigations as mandated
by national Housing Department.
We will continue with our housing program as alluded above but more
importantly we are committed to root out of the housing industry any rogue
elements be it staff, engineers, contractors who are spoilers to this noble
cause of creating homes and sustainable communities.
For more information:
Clayson Monyela
Tel: 015 294 2363
Cell: 082 806 7405
Issued by: Department of Local Government and Housing, Limpopo Provincial
Government
4 July 2007
