The government is shifting its policy on informal settlements away from relocating residents and towards upgrading and developing programmes that would make shack communities a permanent feature of the South African landscape.
Thabang Chiloane, the chief director of communications in the Department of Housing, said last week that the department had fast-tracked a plan for informal settlement development. It would be scrutinised by the Cabinet next month.
Addressing the first sitting of the new Parliament in May, President Thabo Mbeki said a comprehensive programme dealing with “human settlement and social infrastructure, including rental-housing stock for the poor”, would be presented to the Cabinet in August.
Chiloane said the plan includes recommendations to “formalise the informality” of South Africa’s burgeoning shack communities.
Informal settlements have grown by 30% since 1996 and currently provide shelter for 5,2-million South Africans, between 40% and 60% of the country’s urban labour force, says an unreleased report by the South African Cities Network (SACN).
The report reveals that a quarter of the country’s households can be classified as informal.
It says South Africa’s eight largest cities are growing at a rate of 4,4% a year, compared with the general population growth of 2,5%. Since 1996 the population of Gauteng, the strongest magnet for interprovincial migrants, has jumped 22,23%, with the number of households growing by a third.
Informal settlements began to take off in Gauteng during the 1980s. By 1990 there were 47; today there are about 200.
Mzwanele Mayekiso, the director of the Centre for Urban and Built Environment at Wits University and head of a team examining informal settlement policy, said the government had placed informal settlements at the “centre of its policy changes, which will develop responses to them on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to the blanket approach to the problem of homelessness or informality in South Africa”.
Mayekiso’s research team, funded by the National Research Foundation, consults with the government, which has “responded favourably to the findings so far”, he said.
“South Africa has a massive floating population; many people are moving to and fro between cities and the countryside. Their homes in urban areas are, therefore, often transitory,” he said. “The emphasis on [formal, state-subsidised] Reconstruction and Development Programme housing overlooks the complexity of informal housing. Informal settlements should not be equated with chaos, but rather seen as places where people can live.”
Chiloane said part of the plan was to devolve the responsibility for developing informal settlements to the communities, “to nurture a sense of ownership”.
Mayekiso said this would mean devolving greater power to local government, which will be at the centre of informal settlement upgrading. National government, which provides the funds, and provincial governments, which administer subsidies, have led housing development since 1994.
The shift in official policy may have been influenced by the SACN report, entitled People and Places: An Overview of Urban Renewal. It calls for a change in the government response to informal settlements “from one of conflict or neglect, to one of active integration and cooperation”.
“South African policy responses to informal settlements have been clouded by ambivalent and mixed policy objectives. National legislative enactments promoting tenure security are at loggerheads with local government evictions and relocations,” it comments.
Monty Narsoo, a contractor to the SACN and contributor to the report, said the sharp growth in informal settlements “is indicative of the urbanisation of [rural] poverty”.
“South African cities have been unable to keep up with the rate of urbanisation, resulting in growing informal settlements and a thriving backyard rental market, which remains beyond the purview of official policy-making to this day.”
Informal settlements are mushrooming throughout the world, with their global number projected to double in 25 years. More than 56% of the urban population in Africa lives informally.
Settlements generally take the form of unstructured communities without legal recognition, sprawling at the edge of cities. Residents live in a permanent state of legal and social insecurity because they generally invade the land they inhabit and are under constant threat of eviction.
“This insecurity reduces the incentive for residents to invest in the area, and exacerbates social stress and exclusion, which can spur violence and lawlessness of the kind we saw in Diepsloot [last week],” Narsoo said.
He added that while the millions of informal settlers had been patient, the Diepsloot eruptions — apparently sparked by rumours that residents were to be relocated — pointed to underlying discontent.
The SACN report calls for the overhaul of “the existing regulatory context for upgrading informal settlements, to provide a bridge between formality and informality”.
“The challenge takes a number of forms, including the need to regularise the illegal status of the settlements [and] the need to identify ownership rights to land.”
The government’s historic response to informality is embodied in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which set out to mop up South Africa’s informal settlement problem. Although the programme has provided 1,6-million formal houses for seven million South Africans since 1995, its impact has been curtailed by the bureaucratic hurdles housing applicants must clear.
Narsoo said an applicant could wait 18 months before taking possession of a house. In addition, the criteria for accessing housing subsidies of up to R28 279 were so stringent many people did not qualify. A successful candidate, for example, had to prove he or she was married or had dependants. The inability to pay rates and service charges had driven many RDP homeowners back into shack settlements.
“Historically, the dominant official response to people living in informal settlements has been hostile, leading to evictions and removals under the banner of ‘urban renewal’,” the SACN report says.
Calling for the government to focus on in situ development, instead of relocating people from informal settlements to RDP homes, it recommends “a more community-based orientation within local government … that develops the social capital within these communities”.
Facts and figures
South Africa’s informal settlements have grown by about 30% since 1996.
They provide shelter for 5,2-million South Africans.
The South African population is growing by 2,5% annually, compared with the growth of the country’s cities (4,4%).
Gauteng’s population has increased by 22,23% since 1996 as a result of interprovincial migration.
Nothing to do but sit and wait
Three weeks ago Sibongile Radebe* (33) moved to a rented room in Phola Park to escape the danger and squalor her family was exposed to in the home of her former landlord, writes Cheri-Ann James.
The unemployed mother of six young children said her family had to move out of the room they were renting in Thokoza Extension 2 because the living conditions were unbearable. The family paid R800 a month to rent one room.
Their landlord ran a shebeen from the house, which meant that their toilet was used by large numbers of drunken patrons on a daily basis, leaving it dirty and the family feeling insecure about these strangers in their living space.
“I wasn’t happy there. The place was dirty and the rent was too high,” said Radebe while rocking her baby on her back. “My children can’t live like that.”
The crime level in the area is also high and Radebe’s teenage daughter, Nomthandazo* was raped and became pregnant as a result.
The family now rents a room in a tiny RDP house belonging to a woman in Thokoza. The living conditions might have improved slightly, but the family is still not happy.
“The woman we rent the house from doesn’t stop shouting. My mother will be happy when she finally gets her own place,” said Nomthandazo.
Radebe is one of the many applicants on the waiting list for an RDP house in Edenpark near Thokoza on the East Rand.
In the backyard of the house where she rents a room, the enterprising land lady has erected a shack, which she rents out to another family.
The tenant of the shack, Johannes Sekolanye, said that he applied for a house eight months ago but has heard nothing since. He is one of South Africa’s army of unemployed men who just cannot find work. His family’s only source of income is the wages earned by his wife who “works in someone’s kitchen”.
Frustration is running high among those waiting to be rehoused. “Our government should provide us with housing. We voted for them!” yelled Radebe.
But, like many other families, Radebe and Sekolanye have few options, other than to sit and wait.
* Not their real names
Globally, informal settlements are set to double in the next 25 years. — Source: South African Cities Network