[ Home ] [ Speeches & statements ]

Madam Speaker,
Colleagues,
Comrades

The job of governing a democratic country has been compared to the massive task faced by the captain of an oil tanker. The juggernauts of the seas take hours and kilometres to bring a standstill - and even longer to turn around.

The same can perhaps be said of a country - particularly of a country ravaged by centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. The difficulties and the costs associated with South Africa's fundamental change of course have been the subject of many debates in this house in the last few weeks.

You have heard from many of my colleagues of the complexities inovlved in reweaving the fabric of a society which has been torn apart. You have discussed and debated the needs of the various social and economic sectors of our society which are battling to integrate and ot reform.

Among the many super tankers debated by parliament in the last several weeks, housing is perhaps one of the largest. I am grateful to the management of this house, that it has been possible to schedule this debate during a period which bears such significance for the task of turning the housing tanker around.

That task is about to be completed. We have deliberately engaged in a thorough and wide ranging debate with all of those who are party to the housing process before placing before you and the country a strategy for housing the nation.

The national housing strategy is coming to fruition in the form of yesterday's Senate budget debate, today's debate in this house, and the National Housing Summit next week in Botshabelo. I have informed the cabinet that we will follow these events with a presentation to them and to you of a draft Housing White Paper by mid-November.

Now Madame Speaker,

I talked yesterday in the Senate quite extensively about the role and contribution of the private sector to the housing process. I spoke also of the role which the government at all its levels must play in mobilising that private sector contribute and insuring that it is most effectively put to use in the housing process.

My task today is to talk about the role that statefunding must play if we are to achieve our announced target of one million housing starts within the five years of the Government of National Unity.

It is clear to all of us, particularly after the debates of the last few weeks which have shown the need in so many sectors of South African society, that the state will not be in a position to finance the housing effort alone.

This need not be cause of concern. There is great deal of money in this country - some estimates say four hundred billion rands within the financial sector - a considerable proportion of which can and must be channelled into housing.

I spoke yesterday in the Senate about the significant agreement we have reached with the banks, in terms of which they will return at a large scale to the financing of lower sectors of the housing market. But I believe that we must do more, and that to do so will only be possible if we can mobilise more private funds by mobilising more statefunds.

There is a need for greater resources for housing subsidies which will allow more families to access credit. And there is a need for more resources to flow into the communities in such a way that the banks will be more confident about lending money to those communities for housing.

The fact of the matter is, that we have done all we can with the current housing allocation. Through the agreement with the banks, it will become possible to achieve an improving gearing ratio of public to private funds.

But if we are to move into top gear with our housing programme and if your targets are to remain within the realms of achievability, then we must consistently make more public funding available in order to mobilise more private sector finance.

It is a simple fact that the Reconstruction and Development Programme faces us with a very distinct challenge in the housing sector.

Madame Speaker, we must be aware that we will not achieve our goal of one million housing starts in five years unless the budget allocation for housing is significantly increased in the years to come.

But just in case that sounds like a somewhat pessimistic statement let met tell the house that I have been in consultation with my colleagues in the cabinet on this issue. I believe that I have every reason for optimism when it comes to understanding that housing must receive a larger portion of the national budget in the years to come.

There is, I believe, a general recognition of the fact that housing is central to the rebuilding of this country not only in economic terms, but also in terms of the cohesion of families and of our society as a whole.

We must all recognise that housing is not just a question of shelter from the elements, but an essential part of human dignity - the dignity of the individual for which our constitution and which this government stand.

To say this is to include particularly those sectors of our society who will not benefit from access to private credit in the foreseeable future. They are the poorest of the poor, and they should not be made to wait until our economy has grown to such an extent that it is generating jobs on a massive and sustained scale.

In any case, there is no sector of the economy better suited to generating massive numbers of new jobs. International experience shows housing is the jobs catalyst number one.

It is my passionate belief that we have a duty to the poorest of the poor in South Africa.

We must not allow them to sink further into the mire and mud of shack settlements without running water or sanitationservices. We must provide those many millions of South Africans who live form hand to mouth with the concrete hope that there can be more to the world than a life within the confines of a shelter made of mud, hessian, plastic and cardboard.

That hope can clearly taken on concrete forms in the shape of a government housing subsidy. But I believe that we must be prepared and equiped to go beyond the single event of passing on a subsidy to a family in need.

We must make sure that we never return to the hated site and services schemes of the past which dumped families with litte or no income in unsuitable, inaccessible areas and expected them to get on with their lives.

We are determined to create a Community Partnership which will establish a network of support centres across the country and which will have the task of helping people to help themselves.

The Community Partnership will build on the intitiative and the resourcesfulness of South Africans - elements which become abundantly clear to anyone who has ever travelled through the country and seen how people add to their housing as and when they can afford it.

Our task will be to make affordable building materials and sound technical advice more accessible than ever before. The Community Partnership depots will make tools available, they will give access to draughts men, architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, and they will draw on the productive capacity of local brickmakers, carpenters and other crafts people.

Central to this approach to housing is the understanding which I reached with the nine provincial housing MEC's last Friday at our meeting in East London. Many of you will be familiar with the lively debate which has gone on as to South Africa's best road to housing.

We were in agreement last Friday that there is no single road to housing the nation, that housing is very rarely an all or nothing event. Even those families in South Africa and around the world who can be described as well off rarely leave their houses unchanged over decades.

Housing is added to and altered as families grow and resources become available. And we are in agreement that this should be not different at the lower end of the housing market.

There are many parallel avenues to housing in South Africa. We are agreed that they should all be explored in the interests of greater progress towards our ultimate target of housing the nation.

There are of course questions we can valuably ask ourselves within this framework. There is general agreement that the housing process must be people centred in creating homes and jobs, and in building communities.

But if we are talking people centred development, I believe that we must recognise that there is much room for communities or organise themselves with the assistance of the locally focused, state-supported Community Partnership in creating individual or communal assets.

There is clearly a significant role for big developers both in terms of building houses and in terms of imparting construction skills to emerging black entrepreneurs in all of this. But I think that we must recognise that the cause of social transformation in South Africa will not be served if we leave it all up to the big boys who simply drop housing on communities at a thousand rands per square metre.

It is time to accept that housing is not just a question of fulfilling annual targets just as we are now agreed that it is not just a question of a single standard which is unfortunately unattainabl for so many in our country.

Housing South Africa must involve the upgrading of existing communities as much as it involves creating new ones.

Housing South Africa requires that we empower the provinces to get on with the job, that we give them the tools and the financial ability to begin to make a difference in the lives of ordinary people.

The true challenge is for housing to be delivered in such a way that the social and economic power relations underlying this society are changed fundamentally. We will not have achieved the goal of liberation in South Africa if at the end of the day we have a population which is living in orderly housing, but we still have the constructionmoguls in charge of the housing economy.

Liberation - now that the levers of political power are the hands of democratically elected representatives in this house - is about democratising the economy. It is about the empowerment of individuals through education and the transfer of skills. It is about placing at the disposal of the communities the where with all to build and to weave the fabric of a cohesive, productive and peaceful society.

We will only achieve these goals if we recognise that the housing process, just like so many other socio-economic processes in this country, must break up the structures of the past in order that new, more democratic structures can be created.

Nowhere is this more true than in the rural areas. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of South Africans still live within the confines of a system which can only be described as feudal.

Their housing and their livelihoods are intrecately tied to each other. Other people suffer particularly under this system. At the end of a life of back-breaking work, they are often confronted with the prospect of eviction from the farm and the modest dwellings on which they have spent a lifetime, particularly if younger family members are no longer around to serve the needs of the lanowners.

It is an iniquitous system which is also present in other areas of the economy which operate the tied cottage system. We will have to explore ways of radically improving the lot of those who suffer under it. My departmen is looking at models which include the village system, which would give rural people access to housing and tenured property independent of the farms on which they work.

We will work closely with the Departments of Land Affairs and Agriculture to develop alternatives which link rural housing to work in agriculture or to commercially viable land. We wish not only offer greater security to rural people, but also the dignity of housing which is independent from their employers.

Ensuring the viability of rural communities can contribute to the quality of life and the long-term prospects of millions of South Africans. It can also help ensure that our cities are not over whelmed by even greater numbers of people seeking a better life.

There is perhaps no other sector of society and of the economy which gives such clear physical expression to the state of a nation than its housing. Looking around us we see the physical expression of a society based on dispossessio, exclusion and the forced relocation of large sections of its population.

Housing was an element of control wihtin a policy which placed racial separation above the viability of communities. It was the physical expression of the inefficiencies, irrationalities, and in justices of apartheid.

Our job is to ensure that sufficient resources are made available to allow us in years to come to look around us and to say that housing has indeed become the physical expression of a country which is healing itself. Of a country to which each individual is contributing according to his possibilities, and of a country which cares about its people and the communities in which they live.

But housing al also a physical expression of affordability - of affordability both in the large context of what the state can afford, and on the individual level of what a family unit can afford.

Definitions of affordability will change as time goes on. Given the kickstart of the massive housing effort we are debating today, the economy will grow. That is the international experience, and there is no reason to believe it will be any different in South Africa.

As the economy grows so will affordability. And as affordability expands in South Africa, so will individual houses grow.

A flexibile housing strategy which recognises this will seek from the start to ensure that there is a multiplicity of models which can both accommodate the needs of the population and make use of its growing resources.

There weill no doubt within this framework be certained sectors, among them that sector of the housing market which is able to access the growing levels of credit made available by the banks.

Ladies and gentlemen, Madame Speaker,

The image of the moving train has become a very popular one with the parliamentary gallery journalists in the last several weeks who observe the proceeding in this house.

I would lik to say today to you and to them that there is indeed a train which is rolling in this country. A train which is gathering speed and momentum in the direction of a better South Africa. Housing can bae the locomotive - as long as we see to it that it has sufficient fuel to pull the load and stay the course.

3housing (mb) word 4/11housing (mb) word 4/11