Mthembi-Mahanyele welcomes outcome of pre-housing summit session 

28 Oct 2002 

Housing Minister upbeat with the outcome of the Summit of Housing Ministers

PRETORIA: Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele has welcomed the outcome of the pre-housing summit session held by housing MECs as part of the preparations for the national housing summit to be held in February next year. The session was able to identify huddles obstructing housing delivery and came up with recommendations to address these obstacles, said Mthembi-Mahanyele. 

Accelerating spending by Provincial Departments in support of governments economic and social policies was identified by the pre-summit session as one of the most critical areas that contribute immensely in improving quality of life of the people. Mthembi-Mahanyele has therefore promised to come up with measures to address incidents of under-spending by provinces in order to ensure that governments resources are channelled to the programmes that benefit the poor. 

Obstacles identified by the MECs as partly responsible for under expenditure are in certain circumstances associated with:

• Delays in the processing of land acquisition and proclamation of areas for development of low-cost housing

• Slow process of registration of land for transfer by the Deeds Office continues to be a problem. For example the Eastern Cape is required to send its applications to the Cape Town Deeds Registration office. It takes at least three months before an application is finalized and returned to the Provincial Department in Port Elizabeth.

• Some local authorities involved in housing delivery delay in submitting claims to the Provincial Departments of Housing for payment. 

In order to address this problem, Mthembi-Mahanyele will meet with Minister of Provincial and Local Government Mr Sidney Mufamadi, to try and come up with a strategy of integrating programmes through Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) and Consolidated Municipality Infrastructure Programmes (CMIP) and housing plans which the Minister believes can help solve some of the problems identified. Mthembi-Mahanyele has also welcomed the decision by the MECs to initiate a more rigorous and secure process to ensure that the qualifying rightful applicants occupied the sites allocated to them and no one else. This will address problems still prevalent in certain provinces where people allocated houses are at times denied opportunity in favour of others. 

Mthembi-Mahanyele has also welcomed the initiation of a programme that will help provinces grapple with international requirements. This after the pre-summit session observed that globalisation impacted directly on the domestic housing policies because some of the practices emerging in other parts of the world required every nation to consider planning for the growing need of communities to produce, consume and reproduce goods within the home surroundings, and to begin to enhance planning mechanisms to be in a much more better position to absorb the influx of people coming into the economic cities. The phenomenon of a regular migration into cities like Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town is characteristic of the cosmopolitan nature or changes beginning to manifest themselves in South African cities.

The session emphasized the fact that as a signatory to agreements endorsed at international forums like the United Nations and others, the Department has to:

• Begin to put up plans aimed at working towards reducing slum dwellings in South Africa in response to the United Nations Millennium Declaration stating that by 2015 at least 100 million slum dwellings should have been halved throughout the world. 

•  Begin to coordinate governments efforts in consolidating action aimed at providing shelter to as many households as possible, linked to basic needs such as water, sanitation, electricity and roads

• Try to achieve the objective of creating human settlements that are generally affordable to the low-income earner.

Mthembi-Mahanyele also endorsed the sessions support of the principle and policy of providing secure tenure to the poor as an initial effort to encourage families to build assets as a way of achieving gradual growth. 

When families are secure in an environment, they feel confident to engage on issues of governance. They feel committed to decisions reached during negotiations with government at all levels. I therefore recognize the fact that addressing poverty in South Africa should be consciously linked to developing the regional economies, for a start, in the SADC region to impact on migration movements as well, said Mthembi-Mahanyele 

The MECs also pledged their support of Mthembi-Mahanyeles effort to make housing finance accessible to the low-income home-seekers. Acknowledging that housing finance remains a crucial element of creating good housing stock for low-income earners, Mthembi-Mahanyele has vowed to put more effort in ensuring that the private sector comes on board in addressing housing finance needs of the poor.