State’s cure for shack farms

Critics of the KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Bill have drawn comparisons between it and the corralling and deportation of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Bill’s defenders in government, however, consider it a ‘revolutionary” way of preventing slumlords from renting out shacks and controlling the proliferation of informal settlements.

‘The Bill has less to do with people as human beings and more to do with property-owners, the rich and people as livestock,” says Sbu Zikhode, president of the shack-dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, commenting on the Bill’s proposal for ‘transit camps” in which evicted shack dwellers will be housed until permanent accommodation has been found.

‘Instead of saying that people will be evicted from slums after permanent accommodation is secured, we have a situation where people are being removed from a slum, and sent to another slum. Only this time it is a government-approved slum and is called a transit area. This is the twisted logic of the drafters of the legislation,” said Ranjith Purshotum, a lawyer with the Legal Resources Centre.

Lennox Mabaso, spokesperson for provincial housing minister Mike Mabuyakhulu, said despite the current housing backlog — nationally there is an estimated backlog of 2,4-million units — the province had enough government-controlled rental facilities and housing capacity to ensure that those moved ‘would not end up living in tents” or in squalor.

Other proposals contained in the Bill include outlawing the rental of run-down structures and increasing the powers of municipalities to evict people occupying municipal land.

If the Bill is passed by the provincial legislature, owners of vacant buildings or land will have 12 months from the commencement of the Act to take ‘reasonable” steps, including ‘the erection of a perimeter fence around such vacant land or building; the posting of security personnel; or any other reasonable preventative measure, to prevent the unlawful occupation of such vacant land or building”.

Punishment for failure to comply includes a R20 000 fine, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years or a combination of both.

Mabaso said that despite the housing roll-out, slums continued to grow because of the rapid rate of urbanisation and the proposed Bill was part of a ‘multi-pronged” attack on the trend.

According to Mabaso, government research had shown that there was a growing trend towards ‘shack-farming” which involves people who have been allocated RDP houses renting out their former homes in the slums. This, he felt, was hindering the eradication of such settlements.

Speaking at the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, which is home to about 7 000 people, Zikhode said that the issue of shack-rental was yet another example of the types of misunderstandings that arise when shack dwellers are not consulted.

He estimated that about 20% of the shacks at Kennedy Road were probably rented out to or inhabited by people who had been given government housing: ‘In a lot of these instances people who were awarded houses [in areas like Parkgate, about 40km from Durban] were moved quite far from their places of work. The majority of people here work as domestics or in the various petrol stations or markets — their income was never much and, with increasing transport costs and inability to find jobs in the new areas, some have come back or rented out their old shacks to maintain a living.”

‘If we had been consulted about the relocation, this problem would have been highlighted much earlier and solutions could have been found,” said Zikhode, who felt that a similar lack of consultation with regard to the Bill would only lead to more social problems.

The Bill also stipulates that municipalities must, within six months of the promulgation of the Act, quantify the number and location of existing slums within their jurisdiction and submit a status report detailing the population of settlements and the ownership and description of shacks. This would be followed up by annual reports noting the progress of the removal and re-housing of inhabitants.

Zikhode said Abahlali baseMjondolo had already made written submissions to the provincial legislature and was currently devising a mass mobilisation strategy against the Bill.