Cape Town shack fires kill 3 leave hundreds homeless

25/02/2006

Three people burnt to death in a shack fire that broke out in Nyanga, Cape Town, shortly after midnight on Saturday.

Western Cape police Inspector Elliot Sinyangana said 68 shacks burnt down before emergency services workers put out the fire…

The shack fire follows another at Khayamnandi informal settlement at Stellenbosch on Friday in which around 1 000 shacks were razed.

Residents have since been housed in tents at a sports ground in the town. Read More

26/02/2006

About 90 people were left destitute after a fire in an informal settlement in Hout Bay, the Cape Town municipality said today.

Wilfred Solomons, the spokesperson for the city’s disaster management service, said 52 shacks in the Mandela Park informal settlement were burnt down after an unattended candle tipped over in the early hours of yesterday morning. The man who left the candle unattended sustained first degree burns and was recovering in hospital. SABC

InternAfrica doubt that only 1.73 people live in a shack in Mandela Park, the fire average is 4 people per shack, and national housing average of 5 per shack. We estimate 221 citizens displaced by this habitat disaster.

Western Cape a priority for eradication of shacks

Lindiwe Sisulu, the housing minister, says the Western Cape will be given priority in their plans and efforts to create a shack free society. Sisulu visited the Kayamandi Informal Settlement in Stellenbosch that was ravaged by a fire on Tuesday.

Cape Habitat

It is estimated that the fire left about 800 people homeless after gutting more than 200 shacks. Sisulu says she is concerned that the country has still not come up with a strategy to deal with the persistent problem of shack fires.

Meanwhile urgent plans are in the pipeline to move the Joe Slovo fire victims into the first phase of the N2 Gateway project. Similar projects are expected to be launched in other vulnerable informal settlements. - SABC

Sisulu admits to housing blunders

Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has admitted that the country’s flagship housing project, the N2 Gateway, has been a “terrible learning curve”.

Sisulu was called to a meeting in November by aggrieved developers who complained they had not received a cent for several months. She had to intervene to ensure they were paid.

The N2 Gateway project is a joint venture between the city, the province and the national government.

Sisulu said she was pleased that this was the biggest housing project in the country’s history “even though it’s been a terrible experience for us and we are all scarred”.

The city is expected to announce this week when the first residents will move in.

The project was planned as a blueprint for the upgrading of housing projects elsewhere, and is part of the government’s goal to eradicate all informal settlements by 2010.

In an effort to prevent a repeat of the problem, Sisulu said the cabinet would appoint a “special purpose vehicle” or project management organisation, Thubelisha Homes, to oversee the project.

“It cannot be run by a city or a municipality however good intentions might be: the government is not structured to respond to the pace of industry. We are dealing with taxpayers’ money and therefore there are certain steps that have to be taken and certain securities we’ve got to be assured of.”

The decision would be applied to all the government’s mega projects in future, she said.

However, N2 Gateway developers said yesterday they were not aware of Thubelisha Homes. A spokesman for the Sobambisana consortium, Andre September, said the developers were still being paid through the City of Cape Town.

He confirmed that the developers had met Sisulu and raised their concerns about working at risk for quite a while, and that they had now been paid.

Sisulu said that as a result of the state’s delayed payment to developers, the relationship had soured.

The developers were still on site but were not as happy as the government would have wanted.

“We don’t have the muscle because we have not been able to provide the carrot,” she said.

It was for this reason the government had decided to hand over management of the project to a body that could be more effective.

“Outside the government we might have a more efficient delivery mechanism. It’s been a terrible learning curve,” the minister said. - Cape Argus

Project Consolidate could do better: Mbeki

Despite violent protests in some municipalities over a lack of service delivery recently, the governance and administration cluster stated that a qualitative analysis of the past five years of local government indicates that there has been steady progress in broadening access to basic services.

Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela, the director-general at the provincial and local government department, said a communication strategy will soon be launched in the hope of making people address their needs through a specific channel to avoid violent protests. She says this is especially designed for municipal councils and the community.

In the State of the Nation address on Friday, President Thabo Mbeki acknowledged the problem surrounding Project Consolidate, saying it has not been as successful as it could be in accelerating service delivery in local government. The project, a programme that was adopted at the July 2005 cabinet lekgotla, is aimed at finding new, practical and impact-oriented modes of engaging for both national and provincial government.

President Mbeki also said that service delivery was hampered by unqualified managers in the municipalities.

Addressing the issue in Parliament, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the public service and administration minister, did not specify exactly what measure would be taken in making sure that municipal managers are qualified. Fraser-Moleketi said instead of focusing only on 163 municipalities, Project Consolidate, will include all municipalities to ensure that those lagging behind will be capacitated. SABC

Housing Atlas 2005

Low cost housing

Talks between the housing department and banks on the commitment to expend R42 billion on low cost housing are slow. When asked why this is, Lindiwe Sisulu, the housing minister, said she was also frustrated and did not know how much longer negotiations were going to take. However her report stated that a meeting scheduled for March 16 would look into a research that has just been completed on the proposal for the private sector to contribute 20% of its developments into affordable housing.

Housing Demand
The minister did not have the statistics of how many houses have been built since 1994.

Meanwhile, the social development department received 516 cases of social grants fraud but only 128 convictions were secured. The department said it would speed up investigations of the 12 000 public servants who have been found to be defrauding the system. Major existing roads are set to get a face-lift from the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). More than R4.48 billion will be allocated to the provinces and municipalities for road construction and maintenance. - SABC

Marijuana - hope for the homeless

Mbabane, 3 February 2006 (IRIN) - Marijuana grown in Swaziland could help house South Africa's homeless, according to an NGO working with residents in informal settlements.

In ancient times handfuls of cannabis, also known as hemp, were added to clay to strengthen bricks for building; more recently the practice has received a fresh impetus, but the hemp is now compressed into bricks and used for construction.

"With five years' experience in dealing with government and housing, and the bureaucracy in between, I can say I am expertly aware of the controversial nature of this project. However, there are homes built from this technology in England, Spain, France, Turkey, Australia, California and South Africa," Andre du Plessis, a project coordinator with the NGO, InternAfrica, told IRIN.

Swaziland has the highest cultivation of cannabis per capita in southern Africa, according to the Swaziland Council on Smoking, Drugs and Alcohol (COSAD). The authorities' efforts to destroy marijuana crops have failed to discourage Swazi peasant farmers from growing the plant and South African drug traffickers pay handsomely for Swaziland's marijuana, which is prized for its potency in Holland and other European destinations.

InternAfrica cites as motivation a report by the International Narcotics Control Board proposing alternative uses for marijuana to legitimise illegal crops.

"The controversy regarding cannabis is easily resolved when used industrially - the plant is harvested at the onset of autumn [1 March] before flowering and the creation of the drug content. Naturally, once the crop has been used industrially and is combined with lime, it cannot be smoked or used as a drug," du Plessis explained.

If Swazi authorities can be convinced that the local cannabis crop could become a legitimate source of building material, the project's proponents feel that hundreds of cannabis growers could benefit from a sustainable livelihood. Marijuana growing has become permanently entrenched in the hidden mountain valleys of the northern Hhohho Region above the capital, Mbabane.

COSAD has estimated that 70 percent of farmers in this region devote part or all of their time to marijuana cultivation.

"InternAfrica intends to set up one such project, and to replicate it in a controlled, government-sponsored, open and transparent [manner]," said du Plessis. The NGO is currently in talks with the Swazi government.

- IRIN