Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Zuma under fire for housing comments

President Jacob Zuma has come under fire in parliament for stating in his budget vote speech that government has met the housing backlog in most provinces.

This is in direct contradiction to a statement made in parliament just last week by minister of human settlements Tokyo Sexwale who said that the backlog had grown in leaps and bounds.

While there is no official explanation why Zuma made such a sweeping and incorrect statement, Sexwale says the housing backlog is about 2.1 million.

This is significantly more than the 1994 1.5 million backlog.

While government has been building houses at an unprecedented rate for more than a decade, progress is undermined by the system and its duplications, inefficiencies and corruption.

While academics call for a complete review of government’s low cost housing subsidy model, opposition parties are having a field day about how out of touch the president is.

- EastCoast Radio

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