Why are there so many shacks today?

Understanding the problem is often a big part of the problem. It's an injustice that there are so many poor people living in shacks today. The phenomenon of renting the shack to be miserable and landless in adds injury to the insult. While some backyarders' shacks are on private land, most of the shacks where the poor are being unlawfully milked is someone else's abandoned private land or state land.

The “shacklords” are effectively unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of the private landowner or, worse still, the state. This is not a hand up, it's a foot on the back. The iniquity of having to pay some “shacklord” to live in a shack without a proper toilet, electricity and water is doubled by the fact that it's the poor and refugees who are being exploited in such an ugly fashion.

I too would stand in the road burning tyres and throwing rocks if I were being exploited like this.

Being poor and standing on the bottom rung of society should at least be free. As long as people are collecting rent from shacks and there is money to be made in this way more shacks will be constructed in double quick time.

Tackling the problem of shacklords will not be easy. Acknowledging that it is a problem would be a start. Minister Sexwale met a “landlord” in Diepsloot who has 4 shacks and is worried about his “business”. That this “business” adds directly to the “service delivery” problem did not occur to the minister is a real pity.

Minister Sexwale is talking houses that rock, but failed to tell the “landlord” to supply the water, electricity and toilet to the tenants!

I ask you:

"Should it not be illegal to rent out “accommodation” without a proper toilet, water and electricity?"