/ 17 October 2006

Zimbabwe looks to China for houses

Zimbabwe is trying to persuade close ally China to help construct houses for more than a million people in need, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo told the head of a visiting Chinese delegation that providing housing in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities was his government’s biggest challenge, reported the Herald daily.

”We think joint ventures with your people will help. We understand you have big construction companies in Hubei [province in China]. We can make use of them in road, water and sewer construction,” the minister said.

The lack of housing in Zimbabwe was controversially worsened last year when President Robert Mugabe’s government demolished shacks in a shock campaign called Murambatsvina, which the United Nations said left up to 700 000 people homeless and jobless.

The authorities said Murambatsvina was meant to bring back cleanliness to Zimbabwe’s teeming cities and promised more than a million new houses would be built in the wake of the chaos.

But so far only 3 000 have been confirmed built and cash-strapped local authorities have resorted to handing out plots of land.

Chombo said the Zimbabwe authorities were becoming interested in the high-rise models of low-cost Chinese housing.

”We were used to large stands, which consume a lot of land. We should now begin to densify and house more people. It is also cheaper to provide electricity and water on such housing units,” he told the delegation from Hubei, led by political official Ding Fengying.

Shunned by many Western countries because of concerns over land reform and alleged rights abuses, Zimbabwe has turned to strong ally China for increasing numbers of business and investment deals in the past three years.

But concerns have been raised by government critics who believe Mugabe may be mortgaging Zimbabwe’s rich mineral reserves in return for a quick financial fix from the Chinese.

Misery and disarray

In August, the Solidarity Peace Trust said Murambatsvina had left the informal sector in misery and disarray.

The informal sector, in which 90% of Zimbabweans eke out a living, had been criminalised by the very government that should protect their rights, trust chairperson, Bulawayo’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, said at the time.

He was speaking at a review of the consequences of Murambatsvina and what the government had done since then.

”In Bulawayo, 9 000 licensed vendors operate where only 120 individual sites have been built in the past year. This means thousands of breadwinners live their entire working lives on the run, and lose thousands of millions of their goods to theft by the police.”

Ncube also said nothing has been done to help Zimbabweans who no longer have homes.

During operation Murambatsvina police burned or demolished people’s shacks in what the government called a ”clean-up” campaign in the cities in May 2005.

”International organisations are trying to help build houses, but they are concerned that [they] will end up housing government officials.”

‘Erased from the map’

Human rights group Amnesty International (AI) in May released the first-ever satellite images of the effect of Murambatsvina.

The satellite photographs, commissioned by AI, depict the destruction of Porta Farm, a large informal settlement established 16 years ago. Prior to being demolished, it boasted schools, a children’s centre and a mosque, AI said.

AI has also released video footage showing forced evictions taking place prior to the demolitions.

”These satellite images are irrefutable evidence — if further evidence is even needed — that the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities — completely erased them from the map, as if they never existed,” said Kolawole Olaniyan at the time, director of AI’s Africa programme.