SPEECH BY LN SISULU MINISTER OF HOUSING AT THE PUBLIC POLICY FORUM MEETING OF CITIES ALLIANCE

Master of Ceremonies,
His Worship Mayor Obed Mlaba
Delegates and representatives from abroad
Councillors,
Invited guests
Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I want to thank you Chairperson for the invitation you extended to me to participate in your Policy Forum meeting. I have come to understand that your organization was created as a platform for leaders and different stakeholders at local level and in our cities to share approaches and knowledge on how to promote local economic development, or as it conceptualized in local language it is cities doing it for themselves and assisted with networks.

For those of us who have become accustomed to and resentful of the top down approach so common when issues of development are discussed at international fora, this environment where we can share experiences and take from practices that best suit our circumstances comes as a breath of fresh air. I am glad that you have chosen South Africa as a suitable destination for your deliberations. I am convinced you will find a great deal in the way that we do things that you may learn from because for a variety of reasons that you will soon become familiar with, South Africa has a peculiar uniqueness to it.

What makes the Cities Alliance important to us and the Istanbul commitment to be of particular relevance to us in South Africa as well as Africa, as a continent, arises out of the UN-HABITAT Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 which indicated that Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's largest proportion of urban residents living in slums. The report indicated that slums in Africa are home to 72 per cent of the continent’s urban citizens thus representing a total of 187 million people. Now that is a staggering amount of people and might easily translate to the total number of SADC’s population.

The main cities are growing at 4% to 5% per annum. As a result, over the next two decades 87% of the population growth in Africa will take place in urban areas.

As you know, Africa’s urbanization is not accompanied by sustained growth precisely because the continent has been perceived as primarily rural. Cities in Africa are becoming homes of the poor and, islands of deprivation, desperation and squalor for large contingents of people. They are becoming sites and sources for environmental pollution and degradation, as well as social anomie and insecurity.

When the worlds’ leaders met and committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, we as a government took our commitment very seriously. Because South Africa has the political will, capacity and resource to lead the way in Africa, and therefore for ourselves and those beyond our borders we are determined to succeed. The Millennium Development Goals have become a major part of our deliberations as government because in this - our third term of government - no issue is more urgent to us than the improvement of the lot of the poor.  

As in the rest of the continent we are experiencing high population growths in cities (growing by 2.1% per annum). With the result between 1996 and 2001 we experienced population increases of 10.4% or over 4.2 million people. The number of households increased by 30% where we had expected only a 10% increase, a development that indicated a drop in average household size from 4.5 people per household. These figures and others that concern, for example, the extent of the housing backlog (over 1.8 million dwellings are classified as inadequate housing) are indicative of the extent of the demand for adequate housing in South Africa. When one considers the fact that until recently the majority of our people were defined as not belonging in the urban areas - a most unnatural situation has been in existence where the natural pull of the market was deliberately managed – one therefore can understand the nature of our problems. One can also understand the resultant surge after 1994 which has led to this phenomenon. 

Coupled with this is the effect of regional economic migration into South Africa. Therefore, in our context when we talk of the poorest of the poor we are increasingly referring to specifically the urban poor. Concentrated around our major cities living in squalid conditions in informal settlements where crime is averagely 20% higher than at any other place, beyond the reach of health care infrastructure, beyond the reach of normal governance where unless government intervened the conditions could only deteriorate.  

It is for this reason that we have taken a conscious decision that the Millennium Development Goal urging for a significant improvement in the lives of slum dwellers be taken up with such fervor by ourselves. For in the slums this is where we can make a difference, this is where we need to concentrate to push back the frontiers of poverty. 

Most Members of Parliament today will tell you of the harrowing experience we each had when during the election trail before April this year we ventured on a door-to-door campaign and probably for the first time were confronted in such a concerted way by the conditions in the informal settlements. They had grown phenomenally in numbers and as phenomenally in their squalor in a period of five years! 

And herein lies your oft-quoted requirement - political will. We have it in this country, born out of our history. We have committed ourselves to the eradication of slums and we have laid targets for this goal amid a great deal of skepticism. But we have deliberately laid targets because these are an important index of whether we are succeeding in our objectives, as these are also instruments by which we may be measured and judged by the public. We believe the targets we have set are achievable. We recognize that on the face of it they are very ambitious but we have a plan, a plan that we are carefully weaving through the three spheres of government and the communities affected. 

In this present conjecture of our third term of office we find ourselves in perfect unanimity with the objectives of Cities Alliance – uniting behind the banner of ‘Cities Without Slums’. We share a common interest of aiming to ensure that the benefits brought about by urbanisation which encouraged lower birth rates and stabilised the populations of the developed countries are present in and are felt in our cities and towns too. I am sure that, as we are, you are interested in seeing that life is made more enjoyable and that our cities and towns generate stability and economic growth.

My government and I belong to an organisation which nearly 50 years ago conceptualised what we are doing now. Had we had the forethought we could even have easily defined human settlements for the United Nations.

We were convinced then, as we are now, that the clearing of slums and the provision of decent housing in the form of human settlements was a necessary precondition to create a quality of life which would raise the education levels of our people to enable them to play a meaningful role in both the economy and society. We believed then, as we do now, that there is no reason for our cities and towns to remain the enduring museum of the effects of the historical separation of people from the means of their development.

In other words Chairperson, our cities and towns cannot continue in the next decade to be an epitome of misery and exclusion for one section of our population whilst providing opportunity, opulence and the full enjoyment of life to the other section of the population.

A crime victim survey conducted in 2001 by the Institute for Security Studies shows, in addition, that people in informal settlements exhibit higher fears for crime at night than their neighbors in the suburbs. The report attributes this to the ‘general lack of services and infrastructure which increases the risk of victimisation in an environment lacking in basic policing and other systems of protection and support’. Other reports such as the 2002 Nelson Mandela/HSRC Study of HIV and Aids have also showed that people living in informal settlements were prone to HIV/AIDS and other life threatening diseases in comparison to their neighbors in suburbs due again to the lack of provision of services and infrastructure. Lastly, it is clear from other indicators and reports that informal settlements are despite the evidence to the contrary also viewed by our corporate world as breeders of crime. Thus a general fear and stigma is attached to informal settlement which increases the burden of living in these areas. Unfortunately, for those living here, whether law-abiding or not, the fact that they did not choose to live in these areas is not taken into account when their whole status is adjudged by those living in comfort. For them such is life that they cannot even procure housing finance from institutions that judges the inhabitants of informal settlements collectively. In this way in circumstances they did not choose for themselves they are thereby assigned permanent homes wherein they will never be able to have an enjoyment of life. In wanting to eradicate slums in South Africa therefore these are conditions that we want to eliminate so that we can create a better life for all.

I am happy Chairperson that preceding your meeting here today, in Cape recently the South African Local Government Association had a National Conference to discuss issues related to the role of local government in South Africa’s development. In terms of the Conference resolutions these leaders of our local government committed themselves to achieving the delivery targets that government adopted as its programme of action. As part of our programme we unveiled at the beginning of September a plan for the development of human settlements through which we hope to eradicate informal settlements, consistent with provisions of the Freedom Charter as well and in accordance with the Habitat Agenda, and your stated goals.  

Through the plan we will progressively upgrade the tenure rights of people living in informal settlements, working from access to land and essential services, to more comprehensive services, a variety of land tenure types, and ultimately adequate housing and social amenities. Local economic development and the formation of viable communities are also to be integral to the settlement creation process.   

We have set ourselves the ambitious target of addressing the needs of all slum dwellers in South Africa within the next ten years.  Therefore by 2014 we would expect to be able to say that we have contributed towards the Millennium Development Goal in significantly improving the lives of over 2.2 million households which implies that we will have reached some 9 million people.  This would be over and above the households who would benefit from medium density housing programmes, rental programmes, rural housing programmes and a variety of other options which are available within the South African housing programme. 

Although we are proposing a model that does allow us to address the needs of slum dwellers at scale, we are also aware that we still lack the broad-based capacity to address the needs of existing communities. Therefore in the area of informal settlement upgrading we are going back to the drawing board in many respects, and adopting pilot project approach for the first year so that we can learn from these experiences and amend policy so that it is more implementable in the long term.   

The success of the informal settlement upgrading programme in South Africa in the current context therefore will depend on local authorities building their capacity for longer term engagements with their constituent communities as well as the building of deep democracy in communities which gives each community the foundations needed to engage on an equal footing with us as government; and the availability of sufficient funding to allow the programme to address the scale of the problem. 

What is key to this discussion at a cities level is that improved funding and specifications for housing and settlements as well as the option of purchasing better located land, and assembling a wider set of financial instruments with the involvement of the private sector, will mean that it is possible to restructure the city within broader city strategies with housing as the lead department. The additional powers that city government will possess through the accreditation process will also mean that spatial and economic development can be more directly controlled at local level and thus contribute towards more functional urban economies. And these kinds of processes then elevate the need for urban financing on a wider scale which allows interventions in geographical areas that are larger than we have tended to work with in the past.  The current process of inviting local authorities through provincial government to identify pilot projects for informal settlement upgrading and for integrated interventions suggests that we are moving towards these larger urban projects which can benefit from much of the experience available internationally.   

We have also identified that the success of clearing and upgrading slums depends on a strategy that will ensure that as we clear we do not leave behind opportunities for more slums to be created. The local authorities I have visited have come up with a number of clever ways of ensuring that slums do not sprout. The one innovative idea I like is that of Gauteng Province where the Province has worked out a plan to buy back shacks.  

In exploring together a partnership between ourselves, we need to understand our respective capacities and what we are able to contribute into the South African built environment and governance contexts. The variety of instruments to deliver diverse types of housing in an integrated fashion, as well as the funding to achieve this, are largely available within South Africa and are being further developed as part of the implementation of the Comprehensive Plan for housing.  Some of the core capacity is also available in government and much is also available within civil society. However the core technical ability to assemble finance and appropriate instruments through a set of partnerships between the private, public and popular sectors and to bring these to bear in the context of large metropolitan areas and large urban renewal projects is something which would hugely benefit from the technical capacity that is being built worldwide through Cities Alliance.  It is in this area that we would be interested in continuing the discussion of possible co-operation. 

In yourselves, finally we have found a partner that will help us achieve that which we could only dream about nearly fifty years ago when we adopted the Freedom Charter. This was the time when we in 1955 let the world know that in a free and democratic South Africa: 

‘There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort!

All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security;

Unused housing space to be made available to the people;

Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry;

A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state;

Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children;

Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres;

The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state;

Rest, leisure and recreation shall be the right of all;

Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed.’ 

In your presence here today, and in light of your commitment to work with us, we say, makubenjalo!  

I thank you and wish you well in your deliberations.