Red tape, land scarcity and site invasions have slowed the process of building house for flood victims. (Delwyn Verasamy, M&G)
The human settlements ministry is considering renting accommodation for more than 3 000 Durban families still being housed in community halls five months after their homes were washed away in the April floods.
More than 3 000 households who lost their homes are being accommodated in 71 mass care centres – mainly community halls – around the city, with living conditions deteriorating and frustrated residents threatening to return to the areas where they were washed out to rebuild for themselves.
National housing minister Mmamoloko Kubayi told the Mail & Guardian this week her department had applied to the treasury for permission to use disaster funds to rent accommodation for people while permanent houses were being built.
She said the process of rehousing people in temporary residential units had been delayed by recent improvements to their specifications, which meant they had taken longer to build than previously.
As a result, just over 1 000 temporary units had been built across the municipalities hit by the floods, which ravaged southern KwaZulu-Natal and Pondoland in Eastern Cape.
“We have closed 51 mass care centres. We are left with 71, which is still a lot,” Kubayi said.
Reports of the “removal of dignity” of the people still housed in the halls were worrying as people were wanting to return to the places they had come from, which were not safe, she added.
“We are looking at an alternative – perhaps of rentals – to provide housing for them for a particular time using our disaster funds. We need permission from the national treasury to do so,” Kubayi said.
About 200 people who had illegally occupied a Transnet hostel in Montclair in South Durban, after months of living in a hall, were evicted but later accommodated there after an agreement was struck between the department and Transnet’s property division.
Human Settlements Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi.
In terms of the agreement between the entities, the human settlements department will rent the hostel for the families for six months while it builds them permanent homes.
Kubayi said other factors delaying her department’s response to the floods crisis were the lack of project management capacity – which had been identified by the office of the auditor general – and a lack of a standing disaster management capacity.
“This disaster found us not ready. Part of the response is to set up a fully fledged disaster management unit in the department of human settlements. We can’t just rely on Cogta [cooperative governance and traditional affairs]. We have extensive work that we must do and we don’t have the right people,” she said.
The availability of land to resettle flood victims had been a problem as much of the land identified had turned out to be unsuitable for housing projects.
“We also had a problem of ‘not in my neighbourhood’. People would threaten court action to say we will take you to court if you build here. We are not scared to go to court but it will take long and we had to find alternative land,” Kubayi said.
The real-time audit implemented by the auditor general had increased the approval time by introducing several additional layers of bureaucracy to the process.
“The real-time audit protects the purse but it has turned our officials into compliance officers and has increased the time it takes to get approval,” she said. “We need to find a balance where we both protect the money and we don’t impact negatively on the services we deliver.”
The Dalukubongo Business Forum “continued to threaten these projects” and had “come on site” and made “threats to employees who, at some point, feared for their lives”.
Department official Mfanufikile “Snow” Cele was shot dead in the Lindelani area last month in what police said at the time was an attempted hijacking. However, Kubayi said Cele had been on his way to do an inspection of the number of residents at one of the halls, where the number had increased by nearly 1 000, when he was murdered.
“We lost one member of the department we had asked to go to the halls to do on-site verification. Out of nowhere, the number had increased almost by 1 000 people. He had to go and do verification, to see whether the initial team had missed some people, or if something untoward had taken place,” she said.
Cele’s colleagues were shocked – and fearful – after his murder and were initially too scared to go to work.
“We lost two weeks in that as well. Almost everybody was fearing for their lives. They still do, but they are back to work and providing the services that are needed,” Kubayi said.
She said funding applications received from the province and municipalities for emergency grants had been processed and approved.
“We received applications from the province and we made the funds available. We have another application on behalf of the province and we are awaiting approval,” she said.
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