Remarks by the Minister of Human Settlements, Mmamoloko Kubayi, Global Action Plan Debriefing & Stakeholder Engagement, Apartheid Museum
Programme Director:
ED UN-Habitat Director Maimunah Mohd Sharif
Minister of lands, housing, and urban development in Uganda Hon. Obiga Kania
Minister of Works and Housing in Ghana, Hon Francis Asenso-Boakye
Minister of Urbanism and Housing of DRC Hon Mbayu Muabilu
Deputy Minister of Malawi Hon Deus Gumba
MEC Lebogang Maile, Dukwana, MEC Lusithi, MEC, miga
Mayor of the City of Johannesburg Cllr Dada Morero
Members of parliament, Cllrs,
Panel of Experts
Distinguished Participants,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good afternoon,
Let me start by welcoming you once again to our country. Let me also welcome you to the Apartheid Museum and I hope this visit gave you a sense of what South Africa was like for most of the 20th Century. In capturing our past in the way that it does, it is communicating to us and the future generations about things that should never happen.
As President Nelson Mandela declared, “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”
In this way, the Museum is a beacon of hope for demonstrating to the people of the world that there can be unity in diversity and how South Africa is coming to terms with its oppressive past and working towards a future that all South Africans can call their own!
As I mentioned this morning, one of the most devastating legacies of apartheid is what we call the apartheid spatial development. The apartheid spatial development means that our cities were designed to accommodate a small minority and to exclude the large majority of the people. This means most of the bulk services infrastructure was not designed to cater for large populations that are now rapidly urbanizing. This is also made difficult by the unavailability, due to high cost, of urban land for human settlement.
Added to this unique domestic complexity, South Africa as the most industrialised economy in the African continent naturally attracts migrants from the surrounding countries in large numbers. These migrants who enter our country primarily for economic opportunities gravitate to our cities, adding to the demand for human settlements infrastructure.
It is within this context that we have devised mega projects/priority projects that will help us to disrupt and eventually do away with the apartheid spatial development. The Fleurhof Housing Development you just visited today is one of those projects. The project involves the development of a 11 000-unit, integrated housing development in a public–private partnership, on 440 hectares of developed land, in south-western Johannesburg. It is a mixed development which will comprise Breaking New Ground (BNG) units and low-cost housing units, affordable housing units and other units falling under the social housing and gap markets. The development caters for different levels of income.
The priority projects informed the policy to ensure that integrated projects became catalysts of policy attempts on innovative financing across income streams to get a better blend of public and private finance into the projects. Each of these projects has spurred Municipalities, Provinces, Developers and the Human Settlement Agencies into a series of carefully structured projects triggering secondary investments, allowing for mixed-income developments and integrating the City. They also demonstrate forethought of coupled public and private investment decisions that have catapulted these as City development nodes.
Within a wider logic of multi-nodal points that drive the economic development of most of our major cities, these projects offer a model of a new way to finance housing and settlement making. Fleurhof is the bridge of the historical middle and working class divide in the Roodeport Node and Main Reef Road Corridor which has enabled a growing market in Meadowlands in Soweto; Cornubia in Kwazulu-Natal is part of northern nodes driver linked to eThekwini King Shaka Airport and many others.
Yet you also witnessed that our people are also living in informal settlements and as I mentioned this morning, the number of informal settlements keep growing. With the efforts that we are putting to overcome our housing challenges we shall overcome. The launch of the Global Action Plan is an important and a bold step in urging us to hasted at scale the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, particularly to achieve SDG Target 11.1 which is to “ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums”.
Thank you for joining us this afternoon.
