Sustainable Settlements: Quality monitoring Still Wanting
By Thembi Mabhula
Effective monitoring remains a crucial requirement to ensuring efficient housing delivery especially in light of the Breaking New Grounds (BNG) policy which is intended to accelerate housing delivery. Comprehensive Sustainable Settlements entail sound housing delivery to the homeless, reducing the number of homeless, meeting specific targets within given time frames and ensuring ongoing eradication of informal settlements, until they are a thing of the past.
The BNG approach is meant to provide with homes as opposed to mere houses. In this context homes are defined as decent habitations that link and connect with general infrastructure, like roads, schools, places of work and markets, and comprise a system that enables accessibility and interconnectivity. Houses merely depict superstructures of four walls that can indeed be another shack, but made of bricks, isolated from a proper system. Housing is not about the provision of a house alone, but about careful consideration of public, semi-private and private spaces, landscaping, cost saving, community involvement, social and human capital formation and livelihood considerations. One of the major objectives of our democratic government was to rapidly provide the marginalised communities with decent houses, but the race for delivering decent houses has highly compromised quality excellence and effective eradication of shacks.
The right to adequate housing guarantees all people the right to live in security, peace and dignity. It involves more than the right to access to shelter and includes certain indivisible, interdependent and interrelated human rights. Adequate housing is measured by factors such as legal security of tenure, the availability of services, materials, facilities and infrastructure, as well as affordability, habitability, accessibility, location and cultural adequacy. South Africa’s housing policy is consistent with this concept of housing. The South African Government invested R27,6 billion in housing delivery between 1994 and 2004. More than 1,6 million houses were delivered, which affected the lives of approximately 6,5 million people. Despite this, the urban housing backlog increased from 1,5 million in 1994 to 2,4 million in 2004. Moreover, many of the ‘houses’ that were delivered were of very poor quality.
Quality Control
Poor quality, among other defects, is a result of poor workmanship, particularly from amateur contractors who lack the relevant experience. Pre-handover evaluation of houses needs to be thorough so that a house of poor quality is never handed over to the new owner. Rather, the contractor or builder must produce houses that meet all the building regulations and standards. Quality control is key to ensuring the maintenance of decent housing standards.
In the Eastern Cape alone, the Minister for Human Settlements, Tokyo Sexwale discovered during his fact-finding mission that about 20 000 low cost houses across the province were in a terrible condition and needed to be repaired. In some areas of the province, communities have deserted formal housing settlements, because houses were so poorly built that they could not be occupied any longer. The Daily Dispatch, a local newspaper, reported that the number of homes that need be repaired is almost equal to the total number of homes built in the 2006/2007 financial year. Bhisho is spending R360 million to fix nearly 20 000 broken homes in the province while the poor live in flimsy cardboard units and ghost towns emerge from the ruins of disastrous housing projects.
In Grahamstown, a low-cost housing project recently handed over 1000 houses to beneficiaries. However, many of the houses posed real safety risks, like loose bricks over the doorways. Some even had walls that swayed in a slight breeze. Cracking walls and leaking roofs were also reported after the handover to the new owners. Unfortunately, this is not the only housing project to be in such a poor state. All over South Africa housing projects have become the subject of often scathing news reports.
Monitoring the Budget
Any housing project should operate within stringent time frames determined by strict budgetary plans. If time frames are overlooked, the cost of delivering each house escalates. Inflation increases the prices of building material and equipment, and labour costs are also inflated. Delaying the delivery of houses being built consumes more money from the budget, which means the prompt delivery of houses, according to planned targets in response to milestones and key performance indicators, is not cost efficient.
Close monitoring of the budget indicates how available money can be put to use and reflects priority areas. It is gross negligence of duty for any public official to return the housing budget unspent. As a result of poor monitoring of the budget, provincial authorities around the country have failed to use their entire allocated housing budgets and returned it to the treasury at the end of the preceding financial year. Mr Sexwale lamented that, “With a housing delivery backlog of 2, 2 million there is nothing more irresponsible than sending the money back. These people should not be forgiven. We are dealing with a lack of spending and now the challenge is to coordinate and plan properly.”
Demolishing Shacks
The right to adequate housing presumes access to decent houses and should ideally result in progressive phasing out of shacks. Fundamentally, when a house replaces a shack, the latter should be demolished. This can only be achieved through effectively monitoring of the handover process. As beneficiaries receive their keys, their shacks should be demolished. Of course the presumption is that the house that is being handed over is spacious enough to accommodate the household in question.
For many years the government has handed houses over to beneficiaries who simply receive the keys and then immediately return to their shacks, never to evacuate them. Beneficiaries rent the new houses to other people and then sell them after eight years of ownership. Some of these beneficiaries even try to benefit a second time from the subsidy. Sometimes, beneficiaries receive the new house, but sell their old shack. This tends to perpetuate the existence of shacks.
To be fair, government has made a decent attempt at delivering houses for the poor but the process is still steeped in serious challenges and some relate to corrupt activities perpetrated by both its agents and private contractors. This undermines the impact of the entire housing campaign. Former Minister of Housing, Lindi Sisulu once pointed out (2008) that, “we have been very concerned about the incidence of the sale of our houses. Our laws prohibit this, but the practice goes on.”
In Conclusion
In order to build sustainable settlements in a cost efficient manner, the Department of Housing and Human Settlement needs to exercise a tight fist to ensure that every step of housing delivery is well monitored. Huge sums of money have been wasted by officials due to negligence and outright corruption. It is regrettable that what former Minister of Housing, Ms Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele said in her Budget Speech for Housing in 2001 has not been realised to the fullest. In her speech, she said, “As we look forward to the ongoing challenge of housing the nation, we have renewed our commitment to providing housing at scale whilst focusing more on qualitative aspects of housing delivery compared to the previous term of Government. Our engagements in the international arena aim to broaden our influence and sharing of best practices in policy and programme implementation.”
When, dare we ask, will this become a reality?
References:
• Department of Local Government and Housing: Draft Discussion Document.
• Ghettoverits SM, Low Cost Housing In South Africa: A Story of Fraud, Corruption and General Mismanagement. http://ghettoverit.wordpress.com
• Mthembi-Mahanyele S, former Minister of Housing, Housing Budget Speech 2001.
• Ntsaluba G, Daily Dispatch, 19 Aug 2009, Broken Homes.
• Sisulu LN, Minister of Housing, Department of Housing. Housing Budget Speech 2008/09 http://www.pmg.org.za
Effective monitoring remains a crucial requirement to ensuring efficient housing delivery especially in light of the Breaking New Grounds (BNG) policy which is intended to accelerate housing delivery. Comprehensive Sustainable Settlements entail sound housing delivery to the homeless, reducing the number of homeless, meeting specific targets within given time frames and ensuring ongoing eradication of informal settlements, until they are a thing of the past.
The BNG approach is meant to provide with homes as opposed to mere houses. In this context homes are defined as decent habitations that link and connect with general infrastructure, like roads, schools, places of work and markets, and comprise a system that enables accessibility and interconnectivity. Houses merely depict superstructures of four walls that can indeed be another shack, but made of bricks, isolated from a proper system. Housing is not about the provision of a house alone, but about careful consideration of public, semi-private and private spaces, landscaping, cost saving, community involvement, social and human capital formation and livelihood considerations. One of the major objectives of our democratic government was to rapidly provide the marginalised communities with decent houses, but the race for delivering decent houses has highly compromised quality excellence and effective eradication of shacks.
The right to adequate housing guarantees all people the right to live in security, peace and dignity. It involves more than the right to access to shelter and includes certain indivisible, interdependent and interrelated human rights. Adequate housing is measured by factors such as legal security of tenure, the availability of services, materials, facilities and infrastructure, as well as affordability, habitability, accessibility, location and cultural adequacy. South Africa’s housing policy is consistent with this concept of housing. The South African Government invested R27,6 billion in housing delivery between 1994 and 2004. More than 1,6 million houses were delivered, which affected the lives of approximately 6,5 million people. Despite this, the urban housing backlog increased from 1,5 million in 1994 to 2,4 million in 2004. Moreover, many of the ‘houses’ that were delivered were of very poor quality.
Quality Control
Poor quality, among other defects, is a result of poor workmanship, particularly from amateur contractors who lack the relevant experience. Pre-handover evaluation of houses needs to be thorough so that a house of poor quality is never handed over to the new owner. Rather, the contractor or builder must produce houses that meet all the building regulations and standards. Quality control is key to ensuring the maintenance of decent housing standards.
In the Eastern Cape alone, the Minister for Human Settlements, Tokyo Sexwale discovered during his fact-finding mission that about 20 000 low cost houses across the province were in a terrible condition and needed to be repaired. In some areas of the province, communities have deserted formal housing settlements, because houses were so poorly built that they could not be occupied any longer. The Daily Dispatch, a local newspaper, reported that the number of homes that need be repaired is almost equal to the total number of homes built in the 2006/2007 financial year. Bhisho is spending R360 million to fix nearly 20 000 broken homes in the province while the poor live in flimsy cardboard units and ghost towns emerge from the ruins of disastrous housing projects.
In Grahamstown, a low-cost housing project recently handed over 1000 houses to beneficiaries. However, many of the houses posed real safety risks, like loose bricks over the doorways. Some even had walls that swayed in a slight breeze. Cracking walls and leaking roofs were also reported after the handover to the new owners. Unfortunately, this is not the only housing project to be in such a poor state. All over South Africa housing projects have become the subject of often scathing news reports.
Monitoring the Budget
Any housing project should operate within stringent time frames determined by strict budgetary plans. If time frames are overlooked, the cost of delivering each house escalates. Inflation increases the prices of building material and equipment, and labour costs are also inflated. Delaying the delivery of houses being built consumes more money from the budget, which means the prompt delivery of houses, according to planned targets in response to milestones and key performance indicators, is not cost efficient.
Close monitoring of the budget indicates how available money can be put to use and reflects priority areas. It is gross negligence of duty for any public official to return the housing budget unspent. As a result of poor monitoring of the budget, provincial authorities around the country have failed to use their entire allocated housing budgets and returned it to the treasury at the end of the preceding financial year. Mr Sexwale lamented that, “With a housing delivery backlog of 2, 2 million there is nothing more irresponsible than sending the money back. These people should not be forgiven. We are dealing with a lack of spending and now the challenge is to coordinate and plan properly.”
Demolishing Shacks
The right to adequate housing presumes access to decent houses and should ideally result in progressive phasing out of shacks. Fundamentally, when a house replaces a shack, the latter should be demolished. This can only be achieved through effectively monitoring of the handover process. As beneficiaries receive their keys, their shacks should be demolished. Of course the presumption is that the house that is being handed over is spacious enough to accommodate the household in question.
For many years the government has handed houses over to beneficiaries who simply receive the keys and then immediately return to their shacks, never to evacuate them. Beneficiaries rent the new houses to other people and then sell them after eight years of ownership. Some of these beneficiaries even try to benefit a second time from the subsidy. Sometimes, beneficiaries receive the new house, but sell their old shack. This tends to perpetuate the existence of shacks.
To be fair, government has made a decent attempt at delivering houses for the poor but the process is still steeped in serious challenges and some relate to corrupt activities perpetrated by both its agents and private contractors. This undermines the impact of the entire housing campaign. Former Minister of Housing, Lindi Sisulu once pointed out (2008) that, “we have been very concerned about the incidence of the sale of our houses. Our laws prohibit this, but the practice goes on.”
In Conclusion
In order to build sustainable settlements in a cost efficient manner, the Department of Housing and Human Settlement needs to exercise a tight fist to ensure that every step of housing delivery is well monitored. Huge sums of money have been wasted by officials due to negligence and outright corruption. It is regrettable that what former Minister of Housing, Ms Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele said in her Budget Speech for Housing in 2001 has not been realised to the fullest. In her speech, she said, “As we look forward to the ongoing challenge of housing the nation, we have renewed our commitment to providing housing at scale whilst focusing more on qualitative aspects of housing delivery compared to the previous term of Government. Our engagements in the international arena aim to broaden our influence and sharing of best practices in policy and programme implementation.”
When, dare we ask, will this become a reality?
References:
• Department of Local Government and Housing: Draft Discussion Document.
• Ghettoverits SM, Low Cost Housing In South Africa: A Story of Fraud, Corruption and General Mismanagement. http://ghettoverit.wordpress.com
• Mthembi-Mahanyele S, former Minister of Housing, Housing Budget Speech 2001.
• Ntsaluba G, Daily Dispatch, 19 Aug 2009, Broken Homes.
• Sisulu LN, Minister of Housing, Department of Housing. Housing Budget Speech 2008/09 http://www.pmg.org.za