Complaining about the pace at which the eThekwini Municipality was building RDP houses has landed two DA execs an unexpected task.
|||Durban - Complaining about the “slow” pace at which the eThekwini Municipality was building RDP houses has landed the DA’s two executive committee members an unexpected task: getting housing delivery statistics for all metro municipalities in South Africa.
This should include Cape Town - where the municipality is run by the DA - the ANC told the DA’s councillors, Zwakele Mncwango and Heinz de Boer, on Tuesday.
The city’s human settlements committee chairman, Nigel Gumede, gave the mission after criticising the DA for not conducting any research on the houses.
“We don’t count houses that are still in the process of being built, but only once they are completed,” he said.
The response came after opposition criticism of a council report tabled before the finance and procurement committee meeting last week that revealed the housing department had spent 58.6 percent of its budget on about 2 300 RDP houses.
This was way off its target of 7 200 for the current financial year, which ends on June 30.
Gumede told Mncwango and De Boer to find out for themselves how many houses each metro municipality in the country had delivered.
“I am tasking you to do this because if it comes from us, you will not believe it,” he told them.
Taken aback by the project, De Boer said the DA would not be instructed by the ANC.
“They (ANC) are setting themselves up for failure,” he said. “However, I will personally do a comparison on the number of houses delivered in the 2011/12 financial year by the Johannesburg, Tshwane, Durban and Cape Town municipalities.” Once this was done, he said, he would present it to the committee.
Deputy mayor Nomvuzo Shabalala warned the DA not to stir up people’s emotions over houses.
Mayor James Nxumalo told the committee that just last week, they had received an award from the provincial Department of Human Settlements for the Cornubia housing project in uMhlanga.
“We may have challenges, but if we are compared with other municipalities, we remain the best,” he said.
Nxumalo said their short-comings were mainly as a result of not having someone heading the city’s human settlements department.
However, De Boer said councillors were supposed to conduct interviews for the position last Friday, but were told at the last minute the interviews had been cancelled.
“I can tell you now why we still don’t have anyone in that position, which the ANC says is critical. It is because of the allegations contained in the Manase report,” he said, referring to the controversial forensic audit report on the city’s finances and administration.
According to city manager, S’bu Sithole, the city had already finalised 80 percent of the procurement plans for the projects that would commence in the new financial year, which starts on July 1.
“This means we will be operating at a faster rate than before,” he said.
“Our aim is that by the end of December, we will have built half of the (number of) houses. We expect things to be better in the next financial year.”
Sithole said they had given themselves until the end of June to fill all vacant posts.
mpume.madlala@inl.co.za
Daily News