The Crisis Is Systematic, Not Regulatory
By: ALEXACTUS T KAURELET me, as a point of departure, remind the leaders, if they need reminding at all, that what they promised the people was to imagine a country with no poverty. With no one who sleeps under bridges or rummages through garbage for food. On the contrary: everyone would have what you would call a decent home and a decent standard of living.
It seems to me now that the vow that the leadership made before independence is increasingly becoming rather dim and, in the meantime, the bewildered masses are wondering what has happened to their country. They are jobless, landless, homeless, poor and hungry. Namibia is thus increasingly becoming a country that is unable to provide the basic necessities to the majority of its population.
The crisis that I would like to speak to here is the issue of homelessness or to put it mildly – the housing crisis. Some of us have been writing about this issue for quite some time now. And all these years many people, especially those in the establishment, thought we were engaging in pure commentary or, even worse, sensationalising the housing crisis. But this time around the crisis is being recognised by the authority itself. Two front-page articles published by New Era have reference. One reads: ‘Housing shortage reaches crisis point’ and the other says: ‘Housing crisis confirmed’, on 19 March and 28 March 2013 respectively prompted this piece.
The first article came from a speech by the Minister of Regional, Local Government and Housing, Major-General Charles Namoloh. The minister said that: “The critical shortage of affordable housing has become a socio-economic crisis in Namibia”. People in the low- to middle-income bracket are the ones mostly affected by this shortage of affordable houses.
The other confirmation of the existence of the housing crisis came from the 2011 Population and Housing Census Basic Report which states that about 336 000 Namibians have been forced to live in shacks. These are usually made of corrugated-iron sheets, cardboard and in some cases mud. Thus many of our people are condemned to live in those squalid conditions in the land of plenty.
One also has to broaden the discussion about the housing crisis to figure out whether we are just talking about shortage of houses or affordable housing. Because even though there might be enough houses on the market they might be over-priced and unaffordable for many people, especially the young entering the job market and thus forced to rent from others – usually at exorbitant prices. With the others, of course, ending up in what has become an eyesore in our main cities – the shacks some of which are worse than Stone Age structures.
The National Housing Enterprise (NHE) and the Build Together Programme efforts notwithstanding, we are not breaking any ground in solving the housing crisis. In fact the NHE is basically underfunded. So if there is a crisis, then it is first and foremost a crisis of resources both in terms of money and land. It is also a crisis of capacity, planning and political will.
There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of providing decent and affordable houses to our people: the banks, the building monopolies and lack of political will on the part of the government.
What ties these three in an unholy alliance is, of course, the profit motive. They all want to maximise profit whether it is through the loans that the banks give consumers, the expensive building materials sold by those monopolies or the land which is needed for residential purposes that the various municipalities and councils sell at inflated and exorbitant prices.
Thus one often hears from the apologists of the capitalist system that erf sizes are small because the building cost per unit is expensive or that there is not enough land in cities to go round. In my view this is all nonsensical. The municipalities and government are all cocooned in the neo-liberal shibboleths of ‘full cost recovery’ or ‘user pays’ mentality like the private sector. How to move beyond this neo-liberal stranglehold is the challenge.
I maintain here that urban land is state land and therefore can be provided to the poor for free or at affordable prices. If the government is buying commercial farms for millions of dollars for resettlement purposes of the rich, why can’t it do the same in the case of urban land? I think there is a wrong assumption that every Namibian wants to become a farmer. What is needed, therefore, is to employ a two-pronged approach to the land issue – providing land to those who want to be farmers and those who want to settle in cities to either look for work or set up their own businesses. Affordable urban land is central to addressing the housing crisis. What is needed, instead, is an unflinching political will from the leadership.