Human settlements minister Mmamoloko Kubayi says government is increasing spending on security to protect housing projects because of onslaughts by the construction mafia.
Kubayi said her department has asked the security cluster to help deal with the problem. She said government has had to reduce the number of housing units it meant to build to accommodate security costs.
“Instead of us having to produce more [housing] units, we are spending a lot of money paying for security services –which is not supposed to be in the operational costs... And when we increase the money, because there is no money, it means we reduce the units, we reduce what we are supposed to have as an output,” she said.
Kubayi was speaking to Sowetan on the sidelines of the Women Indaba conference held in Kimberley, Northern Cape, at the weekend. The conference focused on the empowerment of women in construction. The minister said some of housing projects had to be shelved as a result of contractors being threatened by the construction mafia.
An audit by the department in January last year revealed that at least 1.9m housing units were left unfinished. Kubayi said her department had made financial agreements with provinces to extend the duration of construction to three years for unfinished projects.
She said two people who had contracts with the department were killed because they refused to be bullied by community forums demanding a share on the projects.
“You find that when we talk about abandoned projects, they [contractors] come to the department and hand it over and say, ‘thank you for the opportunity but my family and my life are important, I’m going to leave it’.“ And it becomes difficult because we have to start the process again, because it means we must go to tender, appoint someone and the project doesn’t move,” she said. “ And when people hear that this project has not been done or was abandoned because of the construction mafia then they don’t want to do it – that is why we have repeatedly requested the security cluster to help us.”
The minister said a contractor from Pietermaritzburg in KZN was killed in a recent attack for refusing to be bullied. She added that due to this intimidation it’s hard getting housing projects completed.
Kubayi said the current backlog is close to three million houses but the figure kept fluctuating depending on the economy and people who qualify for government houses.
“People are moving out of the categories of qualifying to non-qualifying and when the economy is not doing well, they come in to apply and you have that fluctuation in numbers,” she said, adding that the response to housing needs is not limited to RDP housing but includes social housing and those falling into home financing gaps.
Kubayi admitted that a housing programme introduced in 2020 at the height ofCovid-19 to ease congestion in informal settlements had been unsuccessful and was marred by corruption.
In Limpopo, the Special Investigating Unit recommended that Aventino Group and its director, Constance Mohlala, awarded a tender to build controversial temporary shacks in Tzaneen, be barred from doing business with government after alleged corruption. The company was contracted to built 40 “low-cost housing ” tin units at a cost of R64,000 each – amounting toR2.4m for the project.
The structures crumbled soon after being erected. Kubayi said regarding the Talana project and another in Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape where businessman Edwin Sodi’s company was involved, the department has had to dismiss people and recoup the money from the service providers.
She said while the approach may have been unsuccessful, it was motivated by good intentions and had aimed to de-densify informal settlements. “We still have a problem with it now. We asked the municipalities and provinces to re-block the informal settlements to deal with fires.
“Because they are densified, when a fire breaks out everything burns, they burn and that’s why you must break them apart. So it could be that it was a good intention but then it ended up with corruption in it,” Kubayi said.
