Addressing a group of young people in Cape Town yesterday, as part of a housing summit, Deputy Minister of Human Settlements Zoe Kota-Fredericks said the government wanted the youth to be part of social economic transformation.
Kota-Fredericks was addressing about 100 young people at the Provincial Youth in Human Settlements Summit at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
She said in deepening the country’s democracy “we also need your participation in building human settlements in this country as the government cannot deliver housing alone”.
“My department has a lot of programmes for youth. For instance, there is the volunteer project whereby young people can help build houses for the elderly and sick.
“And there are also bursaries available for those who wish to follow a career in construction,” Kota-Fredericks said.
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“Young people must not say things like this. What she should have said was: ‘I demand that my school is of a high standard.’
“We cannot spend more money on human settlements. We can either do a great deal for a few billion people or spend billions on doing little for few people.
“So we are trying to do a lot for less. This is why we have decided to spend more money on basic services so that a lot of people have access to water and toilets,” Zille said. Human settlements MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela said there was a backlog of 500,000 houses in the province.
He said a look at the budget allocation to human settlements showed that it would take about 30 years to provide houses for everyone at the current rate of delivery, and that was assuming the backlog did not grow.
“Our strategy is to ensure that at least everyone in the Western Cape has access to basic services by 2014,” Madikizela said.
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