Getting a foot on the property ladder has become increasingly difficult. As for government’s delivery of free houses to the country’s poorest, it’s a frustrating process, fraught with delays. But for those who have received Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, it’s been a life-changing experience.
Backyard shacks and overcrowded township matchbox houses are becoming a thing of the past.
‘Homeownerâ€, ‘house-warming partyâ€, ‘gardening†and ‘home improvements†are the new catchphrases along township avenues and alleyways.
This is Soweto, Thubelisha to be precise. Thubelisha, a low-cost housing settlement, just off the Potchefstroom highway, is home to thousands of first-time homeowners. The name ‘Thubelisha†is isiZulu for ‘new opportunity†and it is here that many a shack-dweller’s dreams of owning a house have become a reality.
For pensioner Petros Masilela, who arrived in Thubelisha in 2004, his nomadic life of renting backyard rooms across Soweto’s many locations now exists only in his memory. The Secunda-born Masilela is a home owner for the first time in his 70-odd years. In the past he lived a successful life with his wife and four children in a four-roomed Dobsonville house, which belonged to a relative. But after his wife passed away in the late Nineties, his children chased him out of the house.
Subsequently Masilela started his great trek — renting rooms and paying with his mdende — monthly pension. It took six years for his application for an RDP house to be approved, but today Masilela is a proud old man living in his own house.
On an ordinary day Masilela, a cobbler, wakes up in the wee hours of the morning to work on his pumpkin patch and maize garden. Sometimes he rides his bicycle to Zuurbekom, where he has a patch of land, which he uses to plant marrows, sorghum and sugar cane. When he has many repair orders, he gets down to sewing, stitching and polishing his neighbours’ shoes on his cobbler’s bench.
‘I am very thankful to the government for what they did for me. I keep on telling myself every day that had it not been for the government, I would still be wandering around.
‘Old people like me need peace of mind and time to relax. I have found all of that in this house. I do my gardening, I look after my chickens and I am a shoemaker. Today I am free.â€
Across the dusty street live Mampuru Kekana and his family — a wife and two children. The Kekanas, unlike most of their neighbours, have managed to extend their house to six rooms and are planning to add an extra room.
Kekana moved to Johannesburg in the Nineties as a young man from Ga-Sekhukhune in Limpopo. After years of wandering around Jozi’s many townships, he applied for government-provided low-cost housing. Ten years on he lives a much better and stable life with his family and is grateful to own a piece of land.
‘Getting this house took me a long time but I always consoled myself that getting free things requires patience,†he says with a chuckle, sweeping away dirt from his kitchen’s unpolished floor.
Kekana says owning a house made him want to achieve even greater things. After receiving the keys to the house he started buying furniture and is thinking about extending his house.
‘When we rented a room, I couldn’t buy myself things because there was no space and I knew that we might leave at any time. For this I am very appreciative that the same government we complain about every day helped me to start a new life.
‘Our freedom as South Africans has many benefits and I think owning a new house is one of them,†he says.