Informal settlement fires are not unique to Cape Town and its strong winds. For the 2O17 municipal reporting period, 5283 informal dwelling fires were recorded across South Africa. The value of this loss carried by already cash strapped municipalities equated to more than R79 million rand.
Chairperson, no one should have to live in an informal dwelling with the constant threat of losing their home to fire.
Sadly, according to the National Treasury, more than l3% of South Africans live in informal homes. Rapid urbanisation is making ii increasingly difficult to address existing backlogs let alone respond to new demands. The vast majority of municipalities do not even have inventories of their informal settlements, which makes understanding the magnitude of informality almost impossible. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which millions of people do not have
their most fundamental need for basic shelters met because the state and economy have failed them.
Chair, it is abundantly clear that the problems with current approach to housing are numerous. South Africa's housing allocation system is unable to cope with the complexity of migration across provinces, and the outstanding backlog on the housing data base is rousing an ever-increasing tide of frustration, resulting in violent riots across our country.
The informal sale of RDP houses means that desperate South Africans are selling their homes on the informal market to fund their basic living costs, and then again end up living in back yards or zinc structures built on inhabitable land such as wetlands and flood basins - prone to flooding and fire.
The ANC's commitment to political expediency and populism has meant that calls by desperate municipalities for legislative amendments to the prevention of Illegal Evictions Act have been ignored, resulting in Greenfield sites obtained for formal development being illegally invaded before even basic earthworks
can be completed, once more perpetuating the cycle of informality.
The sluggish pace of land reform, combined with whole scale government corruption has meant that land intended for development has not been forthcoming - and in response to the slow pace of reform, our ruling elite has sought to obscure their failures with populist calls for expropriation without compensation.
In the face of this ever-shifting landscape, our national legislation on the issue of housing remains archaic, expensive, and frankly, the most fundamental hindrance to executing real and lasting change.
And juxtaposing this crisis in bitter irony, is an air that has for years been thick with promises of reform - the National Development Plan, the Breaking New Ground Programme, Thuma Mina, The so called New Dawn - but on the ground we are yet to see those reforms materialise into genuine change.
Instead, the country's leaders have the audacity to stand at this very podium and make lofty statements about great dreams of smart cities and bullet trains - while the people of our land languish in the dust of our leader's apathy.
Hon Members, we as legislators sit in this house entrusted with the last remaining rubble of our nation's hope,