Thousands of people across the country are building their own homes, writes Ferial Haffajee
Whizzing south on the Golden Highway out of Johannesburg, newly built houses seem a sad symbol of the Reconstruction and Development Programme.
Hundreds of new houses stand like lonely soldiers, watching over a development dream that seems to have gone wrong. The pastel paint daubing cheap bricks can’t hide the fact that many of the houses built for the poor since the 1994 elections are a sorry affair. They’re tiny, often no different to the regimented match-boxes constructed by successive apartheid governments. Many new occupants have added shacks to homes that are too tiny to hold complete families.
But just a little off the Golden Highway, Canaan has been founded. In April 1994, people who lived in the backyards of Sebokeng occupied their own promised land and baptised it Kanana.
They measured neat plots of land, pegged and allocated them and paid municipal workers who were on strike to help them install water pipes when local authorities refused to recognise their tenure. “Everyone of us wanted to vote with a piece of land in his or her hand,” says Pule Raboroko.
The self-help continued. Kanana’s residents started to save – “one cent, 10 cents, one rand a day” – and then lent the money to one family at a time to build their own homes. In just five days earlier this year, Anna Mpheleki and the artisans of the community put up her home, after she took a loan of R9 000 from the community savings scheme, called uTshani. It’s got four and a half rooms, all in solid brick.
“I’m a pensioner. There is no other money, but sometimes my sons send me some,” says Mpheleki, who must still add the toilet, handbasin and sink to the bathroom and kitchen she shows off proudly.
Although there’s much to be done on her new house, the little touches show great pride: lace curtains flutter against unplastered walls, pictures of Orlando Pirates and posters of Jesus have been hung and a highly polished sideboard occupies pride of place.
Around the country, thousands of people are building their own homes. Most of these shock troops of a hidden housing revolution have done so with no government support. The non-governmental organisations that support this people’s housing movement point to example after example of finely built homes, often far bigger, prettier and more solid than those being built by developers, who must squeeze a profit from the R15 000 subsidy government provides for first-time home-owners.
In over 800 housing groups in 30 regions around the country, those who are saving to build on their own have a name for contractor-built RDP houses. The regimented rows built up close to each other are called uvezanyawo, a Sotho term which means “where your feet show”, suggesting that the homes are so small your feet stick out through the windows when you sleep.
The people of Kanana believe instead that God and government should help those who help themselves. “I saved and saved to get the deposit to build my house,” says Doris Pilane, adding “but it’s going to take me 15 years to repay the loan unless I can get my subsidy.” If Pilane’s subsidy could be paid to her, the loan would be paid off right away and she could easily complete her house.
But therein lies the rub. South Africa’s housing policy was private-sector designed and driven. The subsidy system has clear procedures to funnel subsidies to contractors, who were expected to provide the million homes government has committed itself to in its first term. But there is only belated recognition from government and business that those who build their own homes need support.
With few subsidies and little other help from government before now, the numbers of houses built by homeless people are not breathtakingly high. But the measure of their success isn’t just in the numbers.
“There is a very important peace and development dividend where people have taken responsibility for themselves,” says Ishmael Makabela of the National Housing Board.
Housing Ministry representative Mandy Jean Woods says this kind of housing ups “the happy factor” among communities because it is genuinely empowering. Last year government pledged R10-million to the Homeless People’s Federation, the NGO training communities that want to build their own homes.
In Kanana and elsewhere, most people have learned skills. At the local housing centre, women make bricks; others have produced a scale map of their community, which provides the blueprint for the sewerage system they are now installing. “The consultants told us that sewerage would cost R10 970 a house. Then we went to the hardware shop and asked how the pipes would work,” says Raboroko. Kanana’s residents have laid their own pipes at a fraction of the cost.
But despite renewed government support for people who build their own homes, a visit by former housing minister Joe Slovo, who liked what he saw, and the Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom’s intervention to secure Kanana’s residents right to the land, building is at a standstill.
They’re in dispute with the local council, which wants to demolish the homes and re-peg their plots in line with old red tape and regulations.
Housing groups around the country are battling with local councils who still believe that development is the domain of consultants and private companies only. Newfound accounting skills mean that consultants’ budgets are not accepted willy- nilly. “Why do we need a social facilitator at R250 a day … and what’s this local authority inspection fee?” questions Raboroko.
Some provincial governments are blowing with the winds of change and releasing subsidies straight to communities that build on their own. Comments Raboroko: “What is heartbeaking news is that in the Western Cape, which is ruled by the National Party, and in KwaZulu-Natal, ruled by the Inkatha Freedom party, they’re giving people their subsidies. But in Gauteng, an African National Congress government is refusing.”
The provincial governments of the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal are the only administrations releasing subsidies to communities that build their own homes.
There are other examples South Africa can look to, say housing experts. Sri Lanka’s homeless built a million houses between 1984 and 1989, Indonesia’s poor run their own high-rise communities and in Karachi, the poorest of the poor have planned and laid out their own city, down to the last house and child-care centre.
Residents of Kanana and Karachi meet regularly to exchange ideas. And while the authorities dilly-dally about how to change rules and regulations, there is one certainty: people continue to save and build, be it by selling tomatoes or welding windows to sell to their neighbours.
In Kanana, people tend patches of lush green lawn, dig foundations and dream. “We want to show we are not lousy land-grabbers. We don’t only build houses, we build communities,” says Anna Radebe, as she goes on her rounds collecting for the housing scheme.