With the municipal elections at hand, protests and activism are on the cards {writer: Piet Coetzer}

The electorate almost instinctively knows that election time is when it would get the maximum opportunity to highlight problems it may have. It is also the time when activists and opposing political forces can be expected to mobilise people around contentious issues.

With the general municipal elections in South Africa now almost six months away, it is already clear that housing – both the availability and the quality thereof – will be one of the central themes of the elections, particularly in the country’s metropolitan areas.

In the Western Cape, housing protests and resistance to the enforcement of urban planning principles and zoning rulings have already turned violent. Indicative of the emotions involved were the clashes between residents in informal structures on the firebreak against Hangberg in Houtbay and police who attempted to evict them.

With the Western Cape and Cape Town being the most prominent major centres of political management under the control of the Democratic Alliance – and not the African National Congress, with its majority in both central and all other provincial governments – it would be naïve not to expect political interests being part of the driving forces behind the “housing unrest”.

Times of high tension during emotionally charged protest action are often an opportunity for criminal elements to become involved.

During recent protests organised by the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Khayelitsha, vehicles were set alight and others damaged.

The leader of the movement, Mzonke Poni, afterward claimed that criminals were behind the acts of violence. He did, however, call on residents to “barricade roads, burn tyres and sing struggle songs” in a “disciplined and peaceful way”.

Story of the statistics

A look at the basic housing statistics makes it clear that it would be almost completely unavoidable for the housing issue not to become highly politicised and emotionally charged.

At Knowledge Week 2010, organised by the Department of Human Settlements (DHS) and the Development Bank of Southern Africa for officials, Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale stated there are currently 8 700 human settlement projects under way in South Africa.

He said “construction is happening”, but if the Human and Settlements 2030 vision were to be realised, massive construction sites would have to be established throughout the country.

These would create employment and involve the youth.

The DHS would need to engage with construction companies if it were to meet the challenges faced by the sector in order to deliver the expected 220 000 housing units per year by 2014.

The heart of the challenge for human settlements was economic growth. The country would need to grow its economy faster than the population growth rate if it were to eradicate poverty, said Sexwale.

To meet the goal of eradicating the housing backlog in South Africa, the DHS would need to acquire some 6 250 hectares of land and provide about 600 000 new gap fund loans for people who did not qualify for subsidies, but still required assistance.

The department further needed to upgrade some 500 000 informal settlement dwellings a year, and provide people with the basic services of water, sanitation and electricity while they were waiting for decent housing.

While the government has provided 2.8 million houses since 1994, the backlog continued to increase and now stood at some 2.2 million homes. It could take decades to clear the housing backlog, and the Human Settlements department needed to get those involved in the sector, particularly engineers, to channel their ideas and advice to his ministry, Sexwale said.

He urged officials to consider how the department could locate, access and acquire more suitable land, use new technologies to assist delivery, create integrated communities to deracialise South Africa, ensure that the disposable income of poor people was not spent on transport costs, create new cities and include renewable energy technology in developments.

Sexwale said that they should consider these challenges while keeping in mind two key issues, namely: avoiding disconnect from those who stood to benefit from their ideas; and developing practical, realisable solutions.