Dwelling On An Endless Need
The fire that erupted at Kya Sands in the north of Joburg last week and razed more than 500 shacks leaving nearly 2000 people homeless brings into focus the issue of informal settlements and their eradication. This is not the first incident of its kind and neither will it be the last. There seems to be an acceptance by the authorities and a resignation by society that informal settlements and the risky environmental conditions that come with them are going to be part of life.
But we need not throw in the towel and accept that informal settlements, with their largely inhuman conditions, are the lot of the poor. I was amazed the other day to learn that South Africa has almost the same number of people living in informal settlements as it did in 1994. This is in spite of the government providing about 3 million houses in the past 20 years. Clearly, something is not working somewhere in the system.
The government needs to relook at who is benefitting from its housing programme and where the houses are being built. There have been reports about how some beneficiaries of the government's housing programme have either sold or rented out the houses they received and gone back to living in shacks. Which makes me wonder whether they would do the same if they had not received the houses free but instead got them as part of some self-help housing scheme. But that is a debate for another day.
It is an open secret that informal settlements are the consequence of poor spatial and urban planning during the apartheid era. For example, most of our cities were designed for only a section of our population to the exclusion of others. For those who work in cities, the latter are unwelcoming in terms of accomodation. Many find themselves resorting to informal housing on marginal land in unplanned areas that are consequently poorly serviced.
It is even worse for the unemployed who come to the cities in search of work. The government is aware of the challenges which is why, I suppose, back in 2004 it committed itself to eradicate informal settlements by 2014. We are in 2014 and there is no sign that the government is anywhere close to realising its ambition. Instead, we see a proliferation of informal settlements and continued social exclusion of the inhabitants of these areas.
This exclusion is a raw deal. Informal settlements do play an economic role in that they serve as a source of labour, often cheap, for cities and urban rich. Just do a check of how many domestic helpers and gardeners live in informal settlements proximate to their places of work. Also, informal settlements are not as demanding, compared to the sophisticated urban areas, in terms of infrastructure.
In fact, one could argue that poor informal settlements sacrifice for the formal economy. What do they get in return? Disdain and neglect, methinks. And here I make a connection between the greed of the formal economy and our informal settlements. Those of us who operate in the formal economy have a responsibility to help develop informal settlements from which we source our labour.
For example, it cannot be only the government's responsibility to house people. Corporates must take responsibility for helping their employees find accomodation. But in pursuit of the bottom line, social considerations are often jettisoned. I challenge the formal economy and those who run it to be part of finding solutions to eradicate informal settlements.
The other connection I want to make is between informal settlements and corruption. Stories have been told of how local government politicians and officials have sold land illegally and collected rent from shack dwellers. Services like electricity and water have reportedly also been made to infomal settlement dwellers by corrupt officials.
Also, there have been instances where politicians are said to have encouraged people to invade land illegally, especially when they are not part of the ruling party in that municipality. Such actions undermine the government's determination to eradicate informal settlements and should be dealt with decisively by the national government.
And then, of course there is the money that gets lost or is misspent at some of our municipalities. The latter are considered the weakest link in our system of government and generally where most government corruption takes place. Irrespective of which level corruption takes place on, it undermines the ability of the government to reach its objectives.
Among our many challenges as a country, informal settlements are one of them. Let us not find ourselves losing money to corruption, money which could have been marshalled in our effort to eradicate informal settlements.
