Pretoria - Gauteng Housing MEC Jacob Mamabolo wants to change the province’s landscape and he wants to start with informal settlements and other informal dwellers.
Mamabolo said his department had big plans, including the eradication of informal settlements and backyard dwellings across the province.
In an interview, Mamabolo said Gauteng problems were mainly because of high levels of migration into the province and a smaller land mass than other locations.
As a result, there have to be new ways of dealing with the delivery of houses including using new technologies and curbing corruption.
“We have a huge population. We cannot continue like this. The use of land in Gauteng has to be different. We have a huge number of informal settlements. We have to turn the corner and build new cities. We have a backlog of between 700 000 and 800 000 for RDP houses. That is why we are talking new cities. We want to deliver fast and be quick to deal with the backlog and deal with new demands of human settlements,” he said.
Mamabolo said his department would soon start doing research on the informal settlements in the province and see if the land they are on can be developed into RDP houses. “The eradication of informal settlements will happen in two ways - one route is to relocate people from informal settlements where land is not suitable for development and the other one is to build where people are,” he said.
Mamabolo said his mission was to stop informality in housing, whether it is shacks or backyard dwellings. “We want to know which land is developable and which land is not. We cannot put people’s lives at risk. Our partners in this are GeoSciences. The other middle ground is that technology is advanced in the building industry; now dolomite does not mean we don’t build, it means what type of dolomite and how serious, how deep is the dolomite,” he said.
The department, Mamabolo said, was piloting a project in Ekurhuleni to build housing on dolomite land. “That study is to see how we can use advanced construction engineering methodologies to use land without putting people’s lives at risk.”
One of the things they were looking at was to build one foundation for all the houses on dolomite land. “We can have one foundation and you can build houses on it and make it in a way that people do not see that it is one foundation. So that if a sinkhole occurs, it does not affect everyone and it can be fixed and the risk is minimal.”
Mamabolo said the phenomena of backyard dwellings had not been properly researched and the department was not aware how many people lived in such settlements.
“Many white people live in backyard dwellings called caravan parks. It is very popular in Tshwane in the areas going to Pretoria West and Pretoria East were people live on plots - there is massive squatting there,” he said. The department was doing an audit on how much land it had so they could build houses more quickly.
Mamabolo said he was aware of impatience from people who were supposed to benefit from RDP houses but didn’t due to corruption. “What makes people impatient with us is the levels of corruption in housing. That should not be denied. There are people who have been waiting for a long time. And they have seen others jump the queue.” He said because of this, he wanted the department to adopt a biometric system, There was currently a study being conducted.
Also at the top of his list is the improvement of the mostly derelict hostels across the province.
“We have just completed an in-house assessment of all hostels in Gauteng and we are waiting for the results. Out of that survey we are going to consult all MMCs in municipalities on what to do and other parties that have shown great interest in the hostels,” he said.
In the last few months, there have been a number of land grabs and informal settlements springing up across the province, but he says this does not faze his department.
“We know that the EFF goes around and ‘rents’ depressed youth as mobs to occupy land. The overwhelming majority of our people have rejected that. You cannot give people property through a stick and a plastic. They no longer use corrugated iron and, much more, they know we are going to attend to that decisively because it is illegal. They now come with a stick and a plastic.
“It is not working, because our people are not fools. We encourage our people to refrain from that,” he said.
Mamabolo is sure of one thing: “We cannot live in a country of informality because it will drag our economy down to the wire.”
Pretoria News