Few people or institutions come out of the Bredell confrontation well. The government and its policies, the Pan Africanist Congress and the ruling African National Congress and its allies have, each in its own way, demonstrated breathtaking disregard for the plight and purposes of the hundreds of families who settled on this stretch of vacant land outside Kempton Park that belongs to others.
Government housing and land policies, particularly as pursued over the past two years, do not cater for the destitute. That is, they are not designed to meet the needs of the millions from whose ranks the Bredell settlers are drawn. These are people who are too poor to participate in even the government’s low-cost housing programmes. Why? Because they cannot afford to pay even for rates or services. A similar shortcoming affects government land policy. It now stresses the provision of land for commercial agricultural use. Providing land to the very poor in the rural or the urban areas is no longer considered a priority.
What is quite evident from the happenings at Bredell is that all the destitute are demanding of their government is a small piece of land. There they want to be allowed to build a rudimentary house in which they can enjoy security of tenure, and to which improvements can be made and services might be connected in future. But government policy is, remarkably, unable to accommodate their modest request: government policy denies the very poor the means to help themselves.
This has led various experts in the field, including Geoff Budlender, former director general of Land Affairs, to talk of a “large gap in government policy”. This gap must now filled as a matter of urgency.
This policy weakness aside, government ministers’ behaviour on Bredell has, in a number of instances, been shameful. Housing Minister Thoko Didiza’s statement on national television that the Bredell settlers should “go back to where they came from” reveals a callous disregard for the desperation that caused them, in mid-winter, to move onto a bare stretch of land. At any moment, Ms Didiza can climb into a chauffeur-driven, state-sponsored car and return to the warmth and security of one of a number of state-sponsored ministerial residences. Have a few years on the government gravy train blinded her to the chill world outside occupied by millions of less fortunate though no less worthwhile South Africans? And Steve Tshwete’s bellicose ramblings against the Pan African Congress in the presence of the media at Bredell this week confirmed his image as a buffoon a description of which our minister of safety and security becomes more deserving with each passing day.
In their response to developments at Bredell, the ANC and its allies have seemed strangely blind, too. They have seemed scarcely able to distinguish between the desperation that had led the settlers to erect shacks on that unwelcoming plot from the willingness of the rival PAC to exploit this development. The ruling party and its allies have sought, in some cases, to make out that the settlers were mere dupes of the PAC. What makes this response disingenuous is that the ANC and its allies have themselves often in the past supported the erection elsewhere of squatter camps that is, the settlement of the homeless on vacant land owned by others. The major sin of the settlers in Bredell, it seems, is to have got the support of the PAC.
In the case of the government, too, the PAC’s involvement particularly the possibility that it might make some political mileage of the goings-on on the borders of Kempton Park seems to be what marked the Bredell settlement out for special treatment. A Land Affairs department statement on Bredell amounted to no more nor less than a party political diatribe on behalf of the ANC against the PAC. Moreover, was not Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele touring other recently established squatter camps across the country this week promising to help the inhabitants with their housing needs? We didn’t hear any talk that they should “go back to where they came from”. Why? Because the PAC was nowhere to be seen?
The PAC’s involvement has been as undistinguished as the government’s and the ANC’s. Political parties are given to opportunistic behaviour. But the PAC, it seems, is more shamelessly disposed to it than most. By its behaviour over the Bredell settlement, the party has squandered the veneer of seriousness it achieved through the efforts of one of its MPs, Patricia de Lille, to expose the arms scandal. You cannot posture as a defender of the rule of law one moment and advocate defiance of it the next yet still expect to be taken seriously in a democracy.
What the Bredell squatters have done is illegal. It is also in contravention of the property rights on which the prosperity of the vast majority of us will be built in coming decades. Illegal land settlement must, therefore, be opposed and be dealt with firmly. But those who settle illegally must also be dealt with sympathetically. We owe them sympathy because of desperation that drives them. It is a desperation that results from our unhappy history. But it is also a desperation born, in the case of Bredell, of bad policy and jackass politicians. Until we change land and housing policy, close the gap through which the most vulnerable in our society are falling, and improve on implementation and delivery, we will not rid our society of that desperation.
That desperation warrants our respect and our immediate address. The alternative is a society of ever deeper social fractures in which no class or group of people has a realistic hope of housing, security and comfort.