An explosion of shanty towns in the Vaal may force the PWV government to rethink its rejection of site and service schemes. Drew Forrest looks at the growing blight along the Golden Highway
DRIVING south, it starts with Freedom Park and St Martin’s Trust, rambling down a hillside opposite Eldorado. Across the toll road lies Mjazana, where residents draw water from a Red Cross pump open between 7 and 9pm.
Then, on the right, come Vlakfontein and Grasmere, lapping against the Ennerdale station. On the left is Sweetwaters, and the shack city of Orange Farm, with its 250 000 residents.
Drieziek 4, just four months old, sprawls across the way. Evaton North follows, and Ithoballen Ntshanyane of the Sebokeng hostel. Set back on the right is John Duoy, where Inkatha refugees from KwaMadala Hostel have fled.
It’s called “the Golden Highway”. But the R553 from Soweto to the Vaal might be more aptly known as “the highway of zinc”.
At an average of every 5km from Eldorado Park to Sebokeng, shantytowns sprawl on both sides of the road. Up to three quarters of a million people live under corrugated iron, sheet metal, scrap wood and polythene in at least 11 settlements, most of them without piped water, sewerage or electricity.
Since the election, four new settlements have sprung into existence, and residents of older towns unanimously report an accelerating influx from the crowded townships of the Vaal, from Soweto, from “the plots” and recession-hit local farms, from violence-plagued communities on the East and West Rand, from Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
From interviews with Vaal squatters this week, it became clear that long-hidden homelessness in the townships, rather than urban drift, underlies the shanty explosion. Recent settlers said they were no longer prepared to live with their parents, or to pay high rents on garages and backyard shacks. The election provided the trigger.
The Golden Highway gives context to the PWV government’s urgent, often half-baked, attempts to get housing development off the ground. But it also raises serious questions about the 48 square metre four-bedroomed brick house held up as the ideal by PWV Housing Minister Dan Mofokeng.
Twenty-three-year-old Johannes Nku is clear on his priorities: water, sewerage, roads — and then houses. One of about 2 000 people who have invaded Transvaal Provincial Administration land at Ithoballen Ntshanyane, next to Sebokeng’s Zone 16, since April, Nku was raised in nearby Small Farms.
‘I was staying at home with my family and I couldn’t get a plot,” he says as, shovel in hand, he levels the apron of shack number X389 for a vegetable garden. “I felt that as a man, I had to be independent.”
As in all squatter towns, the tufty veld grass has been rooted out to expose the red earth — Nku fears that the summer rains will turn it into a quagmire. Residents have dug their own pit latrines. Water comes from two standpipes supplied under a lease arrangement from a private stand in Sebokeng and paid for by means of a R20 levy on all shack-owners, who also bought the rubber piping and dug the 200m channel to lay it.
Plastic, the bane of settlements denied refuse removal, clings in rags to the barbed-wire fences enclosing the tiny plots.
Barefoot in a tattered red dress, Elizabeth Mokale (25) says she moved from Evaton because “my family said I can’t stay”. Like Nku she is single — a surprising number of squatters interviewed live alone — and has no job. To keep alive, she visits a Department of Social Welfare feeding scheme in Houtkop.
Five kilometres up the road lies Orange Farm, a five- year-old informal settlement of Brazilian proportions unofficially estimated to house
250 000 people. TV aerials grace the shacks — adopted by the TPA, it now has 30 000 serviced sites spread over seven extensions.
But the intensifying pressure on land is being felt here, too. Chris Rabaji, secretary of the ANC’s Palestine branch — the intention is to rename Orange Farm because Palestinians are also homeless and marginal — explains that the established system of site allocation has broken down.
“To get on the TPA’s waiting-list, you have to pay R64,” he says. “But because of tjotjo (bribery), people are jumping the queue; sometimes they get double stands. Also, so-called street committees are appointing themselves in some sections and charging for sites.”
Rabaji said uncontrolled squatting had started in Extension 6B. In Extension 4, 50 people living in a waterlogged area had been moved for health reasons — the vacant land had since been reoccupied. Ethnic feeling is also running high: from the ANC branch’s executive committee, “Palestine’s” political vanguard, there are bitter complaints about Mashangaan (Mozambicans). “You must use your paper to tell them to go home,” one man says.
The ANC’s biggest headache is Drieziek 4, an area across the way from Orange Farm with
1 800 serviced sites. Because of queue-jumping, Rabaji said, mayhem had erupted when the area was opened for occupation and the allocation of sites had been suspended. Tensions between the ANC and the civic over who now controlled Drieziek had led to “sjambokkings and reports of gun-pointing”.
But rivalry over who runs the area has not stemmed a steady flow of squatters — estimated at 3 000 — since the election. “People are moving in here every hour,” said Simon Morake, who moved from a backyard shack in Soweto in May. Like many squatters, he has an inventive ap-proach to the lack of amenities — he has erected a solar panel on the roof of his shack to run his hi-fi and TV. But he is unequivocal about the state’s responsibilities: “There’s no electricity, no toilets; our new government must get very serious about giving us this infrastructure in a short period.”
Interviewed this week, PWV Housing Minister Mofokeng was adamant that the goal remained formal housing for all. “Site and service is not the solution. Once you have a squatter camp, you’re stuck with it,” he said. Resistance to site and service schemes, stridently spearheaded by Sanco, is partly rooted in the perception that it belongs to the apartheid era.
But confronted with massive and growing need, and the fact that two thirds of the homeless have neither capital nor access to credit, the national Housing Ministry is shifting its ground. Housing Minister Joe Slovo signalled as much in a recent speech to the National Housing forum.
“A serviced site costs about R7 500, and 65 percent of the population has no access to credit to take them beyond the R12 500 state subsidy,” stressed Slovo’s spokesman, Steve Laufer.
Traditional site and service schemes had been flawed by their distance from work and transport — some developments were standing empty — and the lack of state follow-up. The drift of ministerial thinking was towards “incremental housing”, whereby individuals could upgrade their serviced sites over time with state help in the form of materials depots and expert advice.
“We have to be creative,” Laufer said. “Joe (Slovo) is saying that if we set our hearts on formal housing, we are telling the poorest of the poor: ‘We can’t help you’.”