Cape Town - The legislature’s standing committee on human settlements is to investigate why R4 million worth of temporary housing building material is lying unused on vacant land at the airport in Plettenberg Bay, reportedly dumped there by Bitou municipality in 2018.
The material was meant to be used to build temporary homes for 71 families, as part of the municipality emergency housing programme. It was distributed by the national government to the municipality after a fire gutted more than 60 houses in Kurland, Qolweni and Kwa-Nokuthula in June 2018.
The committee wants the municipality, as well as the provincial and national departments of Human Settlements, to account on this issue and the subsequent loss of housing opportunities.
Committee chairperson Matlhodi Maseko (DA) said: “We need to know if that material can still be used. It is deplorable that valuable building material which holds the potential to create safe living conditions for residents remains unused after over two years.
“Housing opportunities are desperately needed, and the dire economic situation in the country has seen the provincial department of human settlements budget cut twice this financial year by over R68m in total,” said Maseko.
Human Settlements MEC Tertuis Simmers said: “The municipality has not indicated whether the people that were affected by the 2018 disaster and for whom the funds were approved, were assisted. We have requested progress reports from the municipality on numerous occasions but none was provided.”
Simmers added: “The municipality applied for emergency relief, to assist families whose houses were affected, directly to the national human settlements ministry in 2018. The funds were then transferred directly to the municipality to implement as per the business plan they had submitted to the ministry.”
On Friday, Bitou’s Director of Community Services Thozamile Sompani told the Argus that the funds from the national department came with conditions including that the structures should be used to assist in decongesting the affected informal communities to avoid similar fire infernos in future.
Sompani said: “The immediate challenge with this condition was that none of the identified suitable land had basic services installed and this infuriated the members of the community who did not want to move without access to basic services.”
Sompani said the community accused the municipality of using the supplied structures to duck its responsibility to build standard cement RDP houses.
“The pressure from the community leaders left the municipality with no choice but to store these completed structures that only need to be assembled.
“The most suitable area identified was the airport because it has appropriate security services and it is an enclosed area that is safer from possible theft and vandalism. The airport facility is also a cost-saving option for storage, as any other would have had major storage cost implications.”
Cape Argus