Gauteng Provincial Government MEC media briefings statement by Housing MEC, Nomvula Mokonyane 9 June 2004 The Department of Housing has noted the challenges and work to be done in fulfilling the promises we made during the election time. The challenges and the programme outlined by the Premier will continue to form part of our work as we strive to deliver houses for the poor in this province. The high number of people converging to our province in search of a better life, and in search of employment opportunities will continue to be a challenge and our plans are therefore geared towards meeting such challenges. One of the critical and most urgent challenges is to accelerate the programme of ensuring that the homeless and those who live in squalor have decent houses built on well located land and access to basic services such as water, sanitation and electricity. As part of dealing with poverty and unemployment and building safe and sustainable communities, the department has identified areas where housing development will take place as part of government's contribution to the people's contract to create work and fight poverty. New housing projects as well as the upgrading and formalisation of informal settlements will be implemented through the incremental approach. We will enrol all our Essential Services projects with the Expanded Public Works Programme, a nationwide programme aimed at drawing significant number of the unemployed into productive work - here we will be specifically targeting youth out of school and out of work thereby contributing to the process of empowering and capacitating people that are unemployed. Through the essential services programme we will formalise and upgrade more than 51 000 stands currently in informal settlements during the current financial year. 200 000 more stands will be formalised over the next 5 years. Only those informal settlements earmarked for future upgrading will be formalised. We will also be working closely with the municipalities and other role-players to prevent further proliferation of informal settlements. Linked to essential services will also be two other programmes. The People's Housing Process (PHP) - to be enhanced further to maximise its intended outcomes - deepening the participation of our people in housing themselves, and also creating strong community structures to continue mobilising community resources and energies well beyond the delivery of housing. For this reason, through the PHP, we will establish 20 Housing Support Centres per year, starting this current financial year. These will be established in areas such as Kanana, Thulare, Diepsloot, and Ivory Park just to name a few. The other programme following closely from essential services will be the Community Builder Programme. This is a new programme - it aims to blend institutional capacity of the private sector with community resources. Through this programme, we will deliver 10 000 housing units per annum and create 50 000 short term jobs per year in the context of the Expanded Public Works Programme. The Premier has identified the formalisation of all informal settlements in Gauteng thereby contributing towards a comprehensive, consolidated and integrated infrastructure programme, as an absolute priority. In this regard we have already engaged the services of five Regional Professional Teams (RPT) and have set up a Programme Management Office (PMO) to speed up the roll out and delivery of services stands in many informal settlements. In this regard, we shall not disappoint, we have already turned various informal settlements into construction sites. The following projects are already underway:
In order to ensure long-term sustainability of these interventions, we are also putting in place mechanisms to involve people from the beginning of the planning process right up to the implementation stage. We want our people to take ownership of these developments - but to also be our partners in a People's Contract. To this extent, one of the RPT's performance measures will be the extent to which people have been involved from the planning stage. The Department through Discount Benefit Scheme has promoted home ownership to the historically disadvantaged communities by issuing them with title deeds for their properties. To date many housing disputes have been resolved and 219 678 properties have been registered and a further 55 342 will be processed by March 2005 and deserving and legitimate beneficiaries will have title deeds for their properties. As a commitment towards building a non-racial South Africa, we are in the process of identifying and regularizing families and beneficiaries located in the former 'own affairs areas' under the apartheid system. Close to 8 855 properties will be transferred to legitimate beneficiaries by June 2005. These houses are based in areas such as Ennerdale, Troyville, Albertville , Roodepoort, Bosmont, Lenasia and Eldorado Park . The first batch of 333 will be transferred by August this year followed by 2000 in December 2004 and the rest be processed by the end of June next year. It is in this area of our work where the department will continue playing a key developmental role by strengthening the mechanisms, which ensures that concepts of citizenship and democracy are enhanced. The emphasis would now be based on establishing partnerships with communities and building capacity for them to take charge of housing development. As we are doing in Kersiesdorp (Nancefield) - we will also invest in public spaces and common areas. In an effort to build safe and sustainable communities and ensuring that deserving people have access to decent housing and shelter, the programme of Affordable Rental Accommodation will be enhanced by utilising Social Housing Scheme for people and families with limited disposable income. We have already identified 23 out of 49 designated hostels to be converted and 4 to be refurbished by end of next financial year. In addition to this we will engage in discussion with the Department of Public Works in order to ensure that maintenance in various hostels takes place thereby having humane conditions for hostel residents. We will also explore the opportunities for backyard rental using individual subsidies. Through the Urban Renewal Programme, we are going to see more people having access to decent housing and self-sustaining community with access to integrate, effective social services. Through this programme we will be able to facilitate the upgrading of existing housing stock and will provide housing that address special needs. We are also looking at entering into Service Level Agreements with various departments and private sector to speed up the delivery of a wide range of services. Through the Gauteng Partnership Fund, we will speed up the roll out of Social and Medium Density Housing. We are engaging with Social Housing Institutions with a view to strengthening their capacity to deliver on their mandate. The Gauteng Partnership Fund has got the capacity to facilitate the delivery of 10 000 housing units over the next 3 years. We will ensure that this is achieved. We have committed our resources from this programme to address the waiting list of 1996/1997 and ensure that beneficiaries that have access to decent housing. Our housing delivery programme will be geared towards building human settlement that go beyond the production of houses, or basic shelter, and ensures the integrated delivery of a wide range of social and economic amenities and infrastructure leading to a supportive context for sustainable livelihoods. The Premier has instructed my department to deal with problems that were identified at Lakeside with houses that were not constructed according to the right specifications and some not completed. By the end of this week we will deploy one of our Women in Housing Service provider from our database to start the work of repairing, renovations and all deal with other problems identified by homeowners and residents in the area The Department of Housing will continue to seek more innovative ways to confront problems and challenges that we are facing in the delivery of houses and other essential services to communities. Since the Executive Council has made already made a pronouncement that the ANC manifesto will be our policy document, our work therefore will be guided by such a document because we believe that it is a people's document of course the people's contract with government. For more information Mongezi Mnyani
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