[Part one of this column can be found here: “Our housing dilemma: What ideas are there that could expedite building interim and long-term homes?”]
It is every child’s right to grow up in a safe place called home. And it is every child’s right to be able to identify such a place.
For a child, home should never be an unsure, obscure and unidentifiable location. It must be one of the surest parts of childhood, this place called home.
Yet for thousands of children, there is no such certainty. Thousands of children have watched their homes destroyed by bulldozers and law enforcement agencies. They have watched their parents cry helplessly over piles of iron, wood and broken furniture.
These children will one day return to haunt us when their childhood trauma will have morphed into adult anger. And they will not be kind to us.
If we are going to begin anywhere to mitigate the anger that is building up in our country, we must begin with big, hairy audacious goals in housing.
We cannot afford a "play nice" approach to housing delivery. We cannot afford an affable politician to head up housing. We need a “break the door down and get it done anti-bureaucracy” kind of politician to ensure that we exceed our housing delivery targets.
The nice guy politicians and their yes-minister bureaucrats have only dug us into deeper holes of corruption, overseen the rise of the housing construction Mafia and delivered no housing. Where is the plan to deliver an expedited housing outcome of more than 500000 units per year per province?
Where is the deal that should be made with the ailing construction industry to make this their big mandate over the next five years and house all of South Africa’s 12 million houseless people?
The reason this is not happening is that there are hundreds of bureaucrats sitting shuffling paper and pretending to cut red tape as if it’s a full-time occupation. The delivery of actual housing to abate the billowing anger at the gates of our democracy is not on their radar. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of affability and have been unable to read the room.
Children born in the 1990s who grew up loving Nelson Mandela are now telling stories of how he betrayed their dreams. They are the angry ones. They are the ones who have moved from water-logged informal settlement to water-logged informal settlement and saw their wood and iron structures demolished over and over.
We have run out of our right to tell people to be patient. After 28 years, we have lost the right to call them land invaders. Because we stifled, obstructed and failed their aspirations to acquire a house. They are now desperate and active home-seekers.
I have spent the last few weeks talking to various people on the street. Most of them are houseless. They are ready to storm the gates. Desperation has overwhelmed them. They hate the political classes. They hate their obstructionist language. They hate the words “lists and process.” They have heard it all before. They don’t believe a word of what they’ve heard to be sincere.
Our democracy is stuck in a culture that glorifies political presence, speeches and visits. We laud the inconsequential behaviours of politicians which end up with loads of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and no houses. We have run out of time.
Political scientist Barbara Walter recently wrote in the Washington Post that civil war begins not when the gates begin to rattle, but when our democratic institutions begin to weaken.
The problem is that most people don’t see the weakening of our institutions, they only wake up when they hear the rattling of the gates..
Our housing delivery institutions are of the weakest in the country. People are beginning to organise politically, not around ideology but around the weak institutions that have failed them.
If you cannot see it, look at the children without a place to call home.
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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