Pretoria - The City of Tshwane yesterday rejected a SA Human Rights Commission report singling it out as the worst performing metro in Gauteng in terms of addressing challenges faced by people living in informal settlements.
Human Settlements MMC Mpho Mehlape-Zimu described the assertion made by the commission about the metro as "false".
She said issues raised in the report had not been brought to her attention before by the commission.
According to her, the municipality was working tirelessly to address challenges in the informal settlements, including spending R58 million to prioritise the relocation of people and improvement of some settlements.
The report, titled “Towards Ensuring the Right to Adequate Housing through the Upgrading of Informal Settlements”, was released during a virtual media briefing yesterday.
It focused on how the three metros – Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Joburg – implemented the upgrading informal settlement programmes, funded by the national government through the urban settlement development grant, to improve conditions in communities in the first half of the 2020/21 financial year.
While the report acknowledged that because Tshwane was placed under administration last year this could have affected its programme implementation, it blasted the metro for "historically" not meeting the grant requirements.
One of the requirements was for the municipality to have a clear plan on how it would use 20% of the grant to address challenges in the informal settlements.
The report said: “The City of Tshwane has fared no better in 2020/21. Even though the City managed to submit a grant plan, the plan’s annexure covering the upgrading of informal settlements simply listed 20 informal settlements and stated that ’engagement with community through councillors and sectional leaders’ would be undertaken.
“No budget was allocated towards these engagements even though the grant requirements permit 3% of funds to go towards community or social facilitation of the upgrading of informal settlements.”
It further said the City's failure to meet the grant requirements was “indicative of poor planning, poor budgeting and poor reporting, and shows a lack of commitment to ensuring the right to adequate housing through the upgrading of informal settlements is met”.
“These shortcomings invariably mean that residents of informal settlements in Tshwane are likely to have to wait even longer to be reflected in City plans and budgets, and that the systematic incremental upgrading of households will be delayed.”
The City was also found wanting in the 2019/2020 financial year after it failed to submit its draft grant plans.
Mehlape-Zimu, however, said she was “willing to have an engagement with the commission at any time they want to”.
According to her, the only issues raised with her by the commission three weeks ago were about a proposal to start a school in Plastic View informal settlement.
She said she could not do anything about the proposal because education was "outside her mandate", but a provincial competency.
One of the report’s authors, social activist Dalli Weyers, lauded Ekurhuleni for submitting a clear plan on upgrading the informal settlements programme.
He said the first project was a city-wide project to electrify informal settlements and it accounted for the bulk of the city's allocated R394 million budget.
Weyers, however, said the commission had a problem with the listing of electrification of informal settlements as a city-wide project.
“And that is partly because one of the benefits of the upgrading of informal settlement programmes is that there is a requirement that the communities are taken along; communities are consulted,” he said.
Ekurhuleni had missed an opportunity to indicate which specific communities stand to benefit from the electrification programme.
The commission commended Ekurhuleni for the implementation of 44.45% of the projects at the end of the second quarter of the year under review.
“That is not a bad percentage; halfway through the year and you are almost halfway through the implementation of the project that you have identified,” Weyers said.
The report said both Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg had made concerted efforts to ensure that the right to adequate housing through the upgrading of informal settlements was met.
"They have done so by developing detailed plans and allocating specific budgets," it said.
Joburg metro had three big projects to account for R370 million it had received from national government.
The projects included the formalisation of informal settlements, electrification and the new basic water and sewer services.
The report noted that the City did not specify the areas it was targeting in terms of formalisation of informal settlements.
Weyers said: "Where the City of Joburg falls short, unfortunately, is that it has not done well in terms of implementing those three projects it identified over the first quarter of the financial year.“
He also expressed concern that according to the second quarterly financial and non-financial report prepared “on the implementation of their related projects, a mere 11% of the budgets linked to these projects had been spent”.
Pretoria News