Low cost housing - south africa

Low cost housing - Community failed by two municipalities

The residents of the Popo Molefe informal settlement in Rietfontein have been forgotten. Services in this settlement are non-existant and two municipalities have thus far failed to deliver houses where the residents can live away from the sewage plant that they have had as a neighbour since 1996. Some of the residents of the informal settlement last week questioned the fact that the houses at the Refentse Low Cost Housing Project have not been completed and the fact that they are still living in squalor. The residents spoke to officials of the Madibeng municipality last Thursday and the officials asked to meet the residents at Refentse at 8:00 on Friday morning. The officials only arrived at 10:30. The Popo Molefe residents were refused access to the property and the officials then held a meeting inside before walking straight past the residents and left, without explaining why or the situation with the houses. This left the residents with even more unanswered questions. Sam Maenetje and Tsepo Patric, two residents of the informal settlement who were at the Refentse Low Cost Housing Project on Friday morning told Kormorant that they are in urgent need of honest answers on the situation with the houses. They said that they had been moved to the Popo Molefe Molefe informal settlement in 1996 by the previous municipality with the promise that they will only stay there temporarily while appropriate land is sought and houses built. The old Hartbeespoort council was then amalgamated with the Brits council to form the Madibeng Local Municipality in 2000 and the situation changed again. Maenetje and Patric said that they put their names on the beneficiary list for low cost housing at Refentse in 2002 and have been waiting since then for proper houses. “The situation at Popo Molefe is not right. There is water but there are no toilets. The water runs through the houses,” Patric said. According to them there are now approximately 3000 people living in the informal settlement and it is not safe to live there. They said that people are dying in the settlement due to the living conditions. “If they can just give us a stand with a yard. We will build our own houses,” Maenetje told Kormorant.Mr. Patrick Morathi, the spokesperson for the Local Municipality of Madibeng, said previously that although eight families had been moved into houses at Refentse there were no plans to relocate more families to the houses in the near future. The municipality was awaiting the completion of a forensic audit by the Department of Local Government and Housing and the NHBRC before the project could be completed. In reaction to Kormorant’s latest enquiry, Morathi said that 150 houses at the project are now complete but that the forensic investigation found that there are some houses which need corrections and some need to be completely demolished. “We must however indicate that this was a process done between Province and NHBRC and the report thereof has not yet been officially presented to the municipality,” Morathi said. He said that the allocation of houses will continue once the matter of the status of the project has been clarified with the provincial department. According to him the original plan was for 1000 units but first had to be scaled down to 500 because of the unavailability of land in the area. “After acquiring the property where Refentse is now, Environmental Impact Studies performed concluded that a portion of the property is in a Magaliesberg Natural Protected area and as such scaled down the project to 167 out of the planned 500 while we have over 400 beneficiary approvals. The approved beneficiaries as well as others will be accommodated in the project called Sunway Village Development in Rietfontein which has been approved by the municipality and the Department of Human Settlements NW to accommodate 1000 low cost houses,” Morathi said. He said that the Refentse Low Cost Housing Project has been faced with a number of challenges. This included the problems with acceptance of the development by residents of Rietfontein and surrounding area in finalizing the township establishment process which calls for public inputs. The same was a problem in finalizing the EIA processes because of a number of objections received and having to go through a number of processes before finalizing these matters as a legal requirement.