Making a Difference

19 Providing Better Housing

ProvidingBetterHousing The Ministry of Local Government and Housing was created to deal with the serious backlog of housing, and this took up a lot of my time and energy. The situation was also exacerbated by people flocking to towns in search of work and a better life, leaving their old parents in the villages to fend for themselves. Since not everybody could be employed and the towns were not able to provide serviced land, people ended up in squatter camps. Experience shows that no country has managed to give houses to all its citizens and we had lots of problems to provide shelter for everyone. Prior to Independence, people had been restricted to their homelands and not allowed to move to towns unless they were contract labourers. With Independence, came the new Constitution of the Republic of Namibia, which in Article 21 Fundamental Freedoms (1)(h) states that: ‘All persons shall have the right to: reside and settle in any part of Namibia.’ Thus people were now free to live where they wished and many chose to move to the towns in search of work. Alienation Scheme People in Katutura and other townships had been paying rent on their houses ever since being moved there in the 1960s, but no improvements were made to their houses. Some needed repairs while many still had outside toilets using the bucket system. When these townships were built, people had been promised that after 30 years the houses would revert to them and no longer belong to the municipality. We had left the country for exile and yet when we returned many years later, in 1989, people were still paying rent to the municipalities. I confronted the municipalities on this issue and it was agreed that the 30-year time period had long passed and houses could be alienated to the residents. Those who could benefit were people who had lived in the houses 151 Providing Better Housing permanently for a period of seven years, and whose rates for municipal services were paid up. I approached the Law Society to reduce the transfer fees, which would have been prohibitive if normal rates were applied and would have rendered the programme ineffective. Judges Brian O’Linn and John Kirkpatrick were at the helm of the Law Society then and understood the needs of the people very well. They agreed to help, and reduced the transfer fee to a mere R11 (we were still using the South African Rand then). The cost of the plot with the house was R100 only because I didn’t want to make it a completely free gift – people don’t respect free gifts. As usual, there were those who were urging some people not to pay the R111. They were arguing that it should be given free. However, many people came on board and in the two-year period of the project we sold around 4,000 houses all over the country. There was a provision attached to the programme that no house bought through the alienation scheme could be resold within five years. This provision was very important and I put it there in order to protect the old people from speculators. There too were some people who talked to me about freedom and the right of the people to sell their houses as they pleased; they said people should be able to choose what to do with their properties. I shot back and reminded them that freedom comes with responsibility, and if these old people who couldn’t read and understand the deals lost their houses, where would they go? Were these other people going to be around to help them? I wasn’t going to allow ‘freedom of choice’ when people, particularly the elderly, were so poor and the judges had helped to almost scrap the transfer fees. Fortunately, this idea wasn’t widespread and people were very happy with the programme. After the two years were over, I extended it for another six months and reduced the time of occupation to qualify to five years. Still some people didn’t make it. They continued to believe that the houses would be given free and they eventually lost out completely. Today these same houses are sold for N$30,000 (Namibia Dollars) or more. It was a wonderful feeling to know that people had ownership of their homes and one noticed how they started renovating their homes, extending them, and so on. The programme was popular and...