Sexwale wants to sue shoddy contractors who have built substandard housing with government tenders and force others to finish housing projects they have abandoned.
He said in Pretoria yesterday that he would name and shame all the crooks involved in corrupt activities, whether they be in national, provincial or local government departments or in the private sector.
Sexwale announced an extensive national housing audit to investigate, among other things: nepotism in government departments; sloppy construction work that has left thousands of houses in ruins; and the continuous awarding of government contracts to the same shoddy contractors.
He noted that the government had built 2,8 million RDP houses since 1994, yet informal settlements still proliferated.
The audit will be led by Special Investigations Unit head Willie Hofmeyr, of the National Prosecuting Authority, and supported by the Auditor-General's office, all provincial government departments, Parliament's standing committee on public accounts and the portfolio committee on human settlements.
The audit would focus on obstacles that affected housing delivery, including fraud, corruption, absentee contractors, unfinished "ghost" houses, and corruption related to housing waiting lists, Sexwale said.
Public servants guilty of criminal activities would be sacked. The SIU had already recovered more than R20-million from 800 public servants who had illegally benefited from housing subsidies.
"We can assure those who are involved in dodgy deals that there will be no place to hide. We are dealing with public money. Heads are going to roll. There are rotten people who have taken advantage of the public sector, and that way public finances get squandered."
Sexwale said "800 government officials have benefited illegally from government houses which should have gone to the poor.
"They are not the right beneficiaries and they have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. At local government level there are 120 people who have been caught."
Although Sexwale is yet to complete his nationwide fact-finding mission on housing delivery, he said he had identified nearly 3,000 RDP houses - built in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal in the past 18 months - that had to be demolished because of inferior workmanship. At least R800m would be ploughed into rebuilding the houses.
"A sum of R300-million-plus has been budgeted just to rectify homes in the Eastern Cape, and in KZN close to R500-million.
"We have budgets for these things, but I'd rather have budgets to build new houses than close to a billion to rectify shoddy workmanship where people have been taking chances exploiting public money."
He said the audit would identify what actions to take.
"Crooks have seen a quick buck in this huge campaign of the government. You are talking about houses that are cracking within six months."
"Those who have done good work, we congratulate; we want to give them more work."
"But those people who are fingered, we want them behind bars, we want to shame them, we want to claim our money back from them, we want to bring civil action and criminal action as well."
Although the government had made it illegal for recipients to sell their RDP houses within eight years of receiving them, "fly-by-night" lawyers and estate agents were illegally selling them, he said.
"Right now the fly-by-nights come and they offer people anything - R3,000. Somebody sold a house the other day for R2,000 and these houses cost more than R60,000. We want to prevent that.
"The audit has got to deal with the illegal sale of houses to deal with these fly-by-night estate agents and teams of lawyers that are all over the poor to trick them."
- The Star
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