Government is seeking solutions to tackle the ongoing problems regarding informal settlements, Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said at the Habitat III Thematic Meeting on Informal Settlements on Thursday.

“Informality regarding human settlements is a clear and present danger on the African continent,” she said.

She noted that South Africans had inherited a country with legalised inequality and that government wanted to give some semblance of dignity and ownership back to previously disenfranchised people.

“African people have been dispossessed of their land and, if we had it our way, we would have spent the first five years of democracy reversing the effects of apartheid [on land ownership],” she said.

She noted, however, that government had bound itself in various laws, including the Constitution, preventing it from giving people their land back immediately, and decided that providing reconstruction and development programme houses would be a way of providing a better life for all.

“People who qualify for free housing include child-headed households, the aged and the poor,” she said.

Sisulu highlighted that, over time, government had realised that the “dependency syndrome” this was creating was unhealthy for the country. Government, therefore, shifted its focus from providing free housing to assisting people to build their own houses.

“When we announced that people under the age of 40 did not qualify for RDP housing anymore, we experienced a large amount of backlash, but it was a step we had to take.”

She stated that government could not continue to give people free houses, as the fiscus could no longer cope with the significant demand.

“We are offering a subsidy for those people who are able to build their own houses and we encourage them to participate in that process, as it gives people dignity and ownership and helps them feel that they are contributing to the economy,” she said.

She added that government wanted to ensure that it gave people the rights that were denied them during apartheid.

“We are currently dealing with challenges around whether we should build people new houses or relocate them to State-owned land, where they qualify for basic services. In terms of our law, we cannot provide basic services to people who live on private land,” she said.

Department of Human Settlements director-general Thabane Zulu added that  government had 33 programmes in place to tackle its housing backlog, the bulk of which was funded from the fiscus.

“R12-billion goes to metropolitan areas, smaller municipalities receive R15-billion and R18-billion is distributed between South Africa’s nine provinces,” he said.

Zulu noted that Gauteng received the largest share because it experienced the biggest challenge regarding human settlements.

“People come to urban centres for work so that they are able to get partial subsidies from government and build houses for themselves. The main challenge [government faces] is getting people out of the poverty trap,” he concluded