By Moyiga Nduru
JOHANNESBURG, Nov 23 2004 (IPS)

South Africa is racing against time to deliver decent housing to millions of its citizens who are currently living in slums.

Just over 1.5 million houses built - many more needed. (Photo: David Fleminger) Credit: PictureNET Africa

Sisulu was referring to an award presented to her predecessor, Sankie Mthembi-Mhahanyele, last year by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.

Sisulu’s father, Walter, was a stalwart of the ruling African National Congress who spent 27 years on Robben Island alongside former President Nelson Mandela. The men were jailed for opposing apartheid, which consigned millions of black people to remote areas known as homelands – and ultimately slums on the edges of cities.

“Black people by the definition that we had in the apartheid era did not belong in the city. They belonged in the homelands that were created to set them apart from the city,” noted Sisulu, adding “They came to the city as sojourners to sell their labour, and they went back to the rural area which was determined to be their natural abode. They were a reservoir of cheap labour.”

Sisulu said that based on a 2001 census, about 10 million South Africans live in shanty towns – but warned this figure may well have risen.

In a speech to parliament in May, President Thabo Mbeki said his government would spend about 2.3 billion dollars to help the homeless have access to basic shelter in the next three years.

He said his government would also ensure that within the next five years, all households in South Africa had access to clean running water.

“During the current year, more than 300,000 households will be provided with basic sanitation,” Mbeki added. “Through our integrated system of government, with a strengthened local government working with our state enterprise, ESKOM (South Africa’s electricity provider), we will within the next eight years ensure that each household has access to electricity.”

According to Sisulu, South Africa’s first democratic government faced enormous challenges in undoing the effects of past policies.

“When we took over office in 1994 the primary aim of our housing plan was to deal with a very fragmented situation at the time. Financially, it was a very fragmented situation where the South African black person had no access to funding for housing,” she noted.

Sisulu now wants to remove the obstacles that prevent blacks from getting loans to buy homes, and encourage contractors to build low-cost housing.

Many builders have withdrawn from constructing state-sponsored houses due to the inadequate resources allotted to them, and also because of the entrenched bureaucracy in the housing ministry that can sometimes take up to 18 months to process documents.

“I have discovered that we can actually cut down the waiting time from18 months to six weeks,” Sisulu said. “Then the contractors can make profit.”

The quality of the housing has also been a matter of concern. Earlier this year a local television station broadcast images of newly-built homes for the poor that were already cracking.

“By then we didn’t know much about construction. We were taken for granted. But now we have put in place mechanisms to check and correct those weaknesses. Besides, the constructors were constrained by a lack of resources which resulted in the delivery of shoddy houses,” said Sisulu, in response to a question posed by IPS.

The government is now seeking to build two-bedroom houses, each measuring 45 square metres, to replace the current tiny 19-square-metre models which anti-apartheid cleric Desmond Tutu has nicknamed ‘Uno’ after the small Italian car.

Tutu, a former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, has urged South Africa to get involved with the Habitat for Humanity project, an international initiative that builds 50 new homes a week around the world, with the help of volunteers.

“It costs about 48,000 rand (about 7,385 dollars) per unit. Why can’t we do the same in South Africa?” he asked over 200 people Tuesday at the second Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture delivered in Johannesburg.

Housing minister Sisulu is also confronted with a lack of cheap, available land to resettle the poor.

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