Housing: A basic human right

Pardon Gotora Features Correspondent
HOUSING shortages have been stalking Zimbabweans for many years now. The harsh economic situation that dogged the country for almost a decade made the situation worse as land prices and the cost of building materials were beyond many locals’ reach with only a few Zimbabweans in the Diaspora managing to buy stands.

Housing is an important issue that keeps many Zimbabweans, especially the urbanites, awake at night as they ponder what to do to own one.

The general definition of a house is a building or dwelling in which people live. The United Nations Habitat Agenda defines housing as a basic human right, which must be accorded to all regardless of gender, colour, race, religion or any other discriminatory milieu.

Similarly, the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) venerates the same and states that “the State and all agencies of Government at every level must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within the limits of the resources available to them, to enable every person to have access to adequate shelter”.

Some questions that are likely to come up would be:

•  Are the mere walls and the roofs over the head regarded as decent houses for the people, both in the rural and urban ambiance?

• Is the shell enough to be called decent accommodation?

•  What would be the best way to describe decent accommodation or decent shelter?

It goes without say that housing provision goes beyond just a four-walled building under asbestos or a round thatched hut in which many people in rural areas live. There are attendant amenities that create sustainable human habitation with due regards to the environment.

Some of the amenities include water and sanitation, access roads, schools, clinics, recreational facilities, churches, power and energy and sources of employment, to mention but these few. However, the Government is seized with insurmountable challenges of providing decent housing to the people of Zimbabwe.

Inasmuch as there is demand for housing in the rural areas, the effects manifest and are much felt in the urban areas. For the former, it is more about the quality of the houses, access to safe drinking water and sanitation, access to sources of power and energy.

There is a tendency to cast a blind eye to the rural areas on most of the projects planned and implemented by institutions in the housing sector. The main reason for such “neglect” is the economic value that decision- makers attach to the investments in rural housing.

The conception is that no investor “in their right frame of mind” would want to put money on rural housing since there will be no returns on such investment. The property does not attract any value, hence it is not worthy investing in.

Consequently, rural housing comes at the periphery of the planning horizon of any institution involved in housing development. In various fora that I have been privileged to attend, there has been a lot of talk about rural housing and numerous documents have been written about the same, but just good enough for the library. Little initiatives have been witnessed and the majority of our rural settlements are unplanned, which render the provision of adequate water and sanitation and all the other attendant amenities challenging.

For instance, how would you electrify the homesteads in the Gotora village in Uzumba under Chief Nyajina where it is even difficult to describe the settlement pattern found there? For lack of a better word, I would rather describe the settlement as haphazard.

The pattern is often determined by the number of children that the father has. With the approval of the village head, the father subdivides his portion to accommodate his sons and on rare occasions daughters. It is often subsumed the daughter will marry and stay with her husband at her in-laws homestead. It will be the obligation of her “new” parents to find her where to build her own house to live.

The few accommodated daughters might be those divorced or widowed and chased away by their in-laws.

The Government has prioritised housing provision since independence as vindicated by annual budgetary allocations. They have even attempted to address the issue of rural housing by creating a stand-alone Ministry of Rural Housing and Social Amenities in 2005.

Although the ministry endeavoured to make an instant impact their efforts were like a drop in the ocean compared to the demand for decent rural housing.

This could be attributed to underfunding and the sanctions-induced hyperinflation obtaining from the year the ministry was created until the creation of the Government of National Unity in 2009 and the adoption of the multi-currency system in Zimbabwe.

From 2009 to August 2013, there was yet another ministry responsible for housing provision known as Ministry of National Housing and Social Amenities.

All these efforts by the Government indicate the magnitude of the challenge at hand-fighting homelessness and also show the determination by President Mugabe to address the people’s needs.

On the other hand, the demand for housing in the urban areas has far-reaching consequences than in the rural areas. Urbanisation has taken its toll on all of the developing countries worldwide, and Zimbabwe is no exception. After independence in 1980, the Government of Zimbabwe repealed all the laws that prohibited the free movement of people to areas of their choice.

Hitherto, the black majority were regarded as migrant workers who were only allowed in towns and cities during the tenure of their employment, after which they would go back to their reserves (kuruzevha).Therefore, they were not allowed to own houses in urban areas and there was a cosmetic demand for housing, which was a prerogative of the white minority.

This ideology even affected the land use planning then, where the planners were planning for a smaller population in terms of the roads, sewer and water extraction and treatment facilities and electricity. There was no anticipation of regime change by the settler government despite all the revolutionary pointers obtaining then.

At independence, the status quo was upended and the black majority began to enjoy freedom of movement. Those sitting tenants who were in Government/ council rented-houses were offered those same houses with a repayment period of up to 25 years.

The urban areas began to witness the influx of people looking for greener pastures, which magnifies the notion that cities are magnets of hope. But this rural-urban migration brought with it challenges, which the Government had to tackle resoundingly. The supply side could not match the enormous demand brought about by this rural-urban migration.

The existing infrastructure could no longer cope with increasing population in the cities and towns.

Resultantly, the sewer and water pipes have continued to burst, which makes them even more expensive to maintain. The local authorities, who are the planning authorities in their areas of jurisdiction, have failed to fully service and maintain the infrastructure due to lack of adequate capital.

This has even hampered the opening of new townships in the urban areas due to lack of off-site and on-site infrastructure. The Government and local authorities have run short of serviced land or even land that is closer to existing infrastructure.

Some of the councils have resorted to creating infill stands to maximise on the existing infrastructure, a situation which has to some extent compromised on the environment since some of the pieces of land are on wetlands which must be preserved.

Meanwhile, failure by Government to meet the ballooning housing demand led to the colossal mushrooming of informal settlements, side-buildings on existing stands, overcrowding in most high-density suburbs, unsanctioned connections of water, sewer and electricity among other challenges. The informal settlements dearth for proper water and sanitation facilities, lacks security of tenure and pose a greater risk of chronic diseases outbreak, and endanger the environment.

The UN Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat in Mozambique), in its publication,“Slum Upgrading and Vulnerability Reduction in Mozambique”, intimated that the living conditions for the majority of the urban population in Mozambique are not dissimilar to those found in other rapidly urbanising countries, particularly in Africa.

The conditions are characterised by unplanned settlements, which house over 70 percent of the population in Mozambique, the vast majority of whom live in overcrowded conditions and lack access to secure tenure, structurally sound housing, and improved water and sanitation. In most developing countries, Zimbabwe included, informal settlements often grow at a rate far surpassing the rate of investment in urban infrastructure and the requisite services.

In view of the extent of the challenges in providing decent housing to the people, concerted effort is required from all the stakeholders in the housing sector.

The Government, the local authorities, professional bodies such as planners, engineers and architects, research institutions like universities and polytechnic colleges; land developers, banks and building societies; community-based organisations, non-governmental organisations; and the community itself among other stakeholders should join forces to tackle homelessness.

We used to have a slogan “Housing for all by 2020”, but this has since gone into oblivion. Whatever the target the sector has agreed upon, it requires not individual efforts, but we need to join hands as a nation.

I hope the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing will be instrumental in re-energising the stakeholders and bring a breath of fresh air. My plea to the ministry would be to re-align their priorities and bring rural housing on the radar.

The issue goes beyond just the communal areas and the old resettlements. We now have the new farmers who were resettled under the Government’s land reform programme on the eve of the new millennium and they must be taken care of in terms of housing provision.

Whether the Government will provide afford-able loans or construct houses remains to be seen.

Hopefully, the ministry has the prototype designs for a typical homestead like the ones used to build model homesteads for some of our traditional leaders.

•  Pardon Gotora is a Housing Officer in the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing. The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal and do not in any way reflect those of the ministry. Feedback: [email protected]