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Lloyd Gumbo Senior Reporter
Government will not compensate residents whose houses are being razed down for building on undesignated sites, Parliamentarians heard on Thursday.
From now on, no one including those under cooperatives, will be allowed to build houses without approval from the Government and without all the required infrastructure.
No resident will also be allowed to construct houses before land developments are complete.
Thousands of home-seekers in Harare had their houses destroyed after they built houses at undesignated points.
They were duped by land barons who allocated them stands at illegal sites after paying thousands of dollars.
Deputy Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Christopher Chingosho, said Government was in the process of reclaiming areas that were invaded by land barons.
He made the remarks in the Senate on Thursday while fielding questions from the floor.
“There will be no compensation to those people whose houses were destroyed because they constructed in wrong places or constructed without following the Government’s rules and regulations because most people are those in peri-urban areas,” said Deputy Minister Chingosho.
“When you go in the peri-urban area, the condition is that you go there on temporary basis and whatever you do there is temporary. People were advised not to construct permanent structures.
“This message is clear to everybody but it is now being complicated by those land barons, some of whom claim to own those pieces of land and ask people to pay them. The Ministry is seriously dealing with such cases and some of the land barons have been brought to book.”
However, Senators took the Deputy Minister to task querying why Government waited for people to first construct their houses before destroying them.
Zanu-PF Senator for Manicaland, Cde Shadreck Chipanga queried: “Why were they allowed to construct these structures in the first place without the Government moving in to stop them?”
Mashonaland Central representative, Cde Alice Chimbudzi (Zanu-PF) added: “What is your policy as Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing in imparting knowledge to people so that they know their rights in as far as construction of acquired land is concerned?”
Deputy Minister Chingosho said most of the land that was illegally parcelled out by land barons were under local authorities.
He said Government instructed local authorities to move in and stop illegal land allocations, failure of which they would be held accountable.
“You would find that the city councils or the municipalities and even within those municipalities, you will find that there are authorities within that local authority who are even worsening the problem by involving themselves in the land baron scandal.
“The Ministry is now working closely with councils and a deadline has been set to say, by the end of this year, any local authority whose area is still seen practising or affected by that problem, it will be squarely the local authority itself to explain to the Ministry. It is a complicated problem where you find the responsible authorities spearheading that problem,” said Deputy Minister Chingosho.
He added that land invasions would be a thing of the past by early next year as Government and local authorities were working on mechanisms to stop the scourge.
“The new policy as far as the Ministry is concerned in land distribution is that, as with immediate effect, nobody is going to be allowed to construct any structure without the approval of the Ministry and without servicing the land so that there are roads, water ways and all other infrastructural necessities.
“Therefore, if people are to be resettled or given land, it is supposed to have been serviced already with the entire infrastructure that is essential for people to live properly,” said Deputy Minister Chingosho.
Thousands of illegal structures in Harare have been destroyed with a number of alleged land appearing before the courts.
Online Reporter