Hon Chairperson, the EFF rejects Budget Vote
38 on human settlement. South Africa is facing a huge housing crisis and it will soon blow up in our faces and bring this country into a stand still.
Statistics South Africa reports that by 2018 South Africa had backlog of 2,2 million housing units and the government has only built over three million houses since 1994. This means that it may take us another twenty years just to build two million more houses. This means that at the current pace, there are people who may die without ever having had a proper house in this country.
While this crisis is happening, the ANC is busy destroying houses of black people. Just a few weeks after election results were announced, ANC-led municipalities across the country
started, on a massive onslaught against our people whose only sin was simply to build house for themselves.
In the Buffalo city in the Eastern Cape, the ANC government destroyed millions of worthy houses of black people, who had out of their own sweat built themselves, close to East London airport.
In Ntabankulu, in the Eastern Cape the local municipality destroyed houses they claimed had been built illegally on municipality land. In Alexandre in Gauteng, Rock JHB Metropolis officials working with the provincial government destroyed people's houses under the pretext that they were built illegally.
The ANC has been using the laws to keep African people homeless in this country but what this points to Chairperson, is that there is no overarching vision, no plan, no political will to alleviate the housing crisis in this country. The Budget presented here willful insufficient to deal with the housing challenging facing our own people and fails to re- imagine the country's approach to the problem of housing backlog and urban's prowl and fails to acknowledge that this is a consequence of
having a few cities that can reasonably absorb a large number of labour.
The dispossession of African land in rural areas, the uneven development of cities, the poor employment prospects in rural areas has caused massive urban prowl that your policy makers have been unable to handle. As a consequence, we have thousands of people flocking in Gauteng, Cape Town, and Durban each and every ear because there is no hope of them finding work anywhere else in South Africa.
The housing crisis in this country therefore is at the same time as a labour crisis. It is about the pride of millions of black people who are unable find jobs closer to their homes. It is as a consequence of this that black people have been forcibly repossessing land in urban areas to build houses for themselves, because your government has been unable to do so for the past twenty-five years.
The dehumanizing reality of homelessness, the psychological injury of not having a place to call yours are both rooted in
history of land dispossessed and the brutal apartheid project of social engineering. The state is not out of options and can resolve the housing crisis if there is a political will to do so.
This can be done through the following:
Do away with apartheid special planning and expropriate land without compensation, closer to inner city centre to build sustainable housing for all. Establish a state housing company that will progressively build house for the poor, improve the quality and size of low cost houses through the state house construction company. So that the state regulates housing finance by providing housing finance that does not exceed the period of ten years. Guaranteed integrated human settlement with guaranteed bulk services such as water provision, electricity, sewerage systems, parks and recreation facilities. Convert unused state building into affordable houses for the poor, offering people long term secured leasehold to these buildings.
The state must once and for all clarify the powers of traditional leaders to allocate land for housing in rural areas. People's livelihoods are at risk because of the contestation between traditional leaders and municipalities about who has power to allocate land for housing. Failure to do this, will collapse our current cities because we cannot sustainably have any human settlement strategy that will accommodate the current growth of cities.
The failure of the post 1994 regime, to decentralize economic development and promote industrialization in areas other than those cities developed during colonialism and apartheid means that we will have more and more people moving into a few cities and towns looking for employment and not having any place to stay. The problem of human settlement is directly linked to our inability to decentralize development to area other than our current cities. Unless we do this, we will continue pumping money for short term, unsustainable solutions to the human settlement challenge. We reject this budget as EFF. Thanks Chairperson.
THE HOUSE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks hon member.