Durban - The ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) said it missed an opportunity to deal with hijacked buildings in various metros when it failed to act after people were evicted.
The party was providing a progress report on a number of service delivery issues and challenges as it held a special NEC meeting in Joburg at the weekend.
In August, a fire engulfed an illegally occupied, abandoned, stateowned building in Joburg, killing 77 people and injuring 88 in one of the deadliest fires in the country’s history.
The eThekwini Municipality has said it has 88 problem buildings and planned to take steps to deal with them including demolishing buildings if necessary.
The party’s NEC member and Deputy Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Parks Tau, said a number of plans had been put in place to address hijacked buildings, but problems emerged when municipalities did not intervene on behalf of those who had been evicted.
“As soon as you do not address this, the problem recurs, they go to other buildings.
“There was a gap and there were court cases that found that the municipality must find alternative accommodation if people are evicted from a privately owned building.”
Tau said this was part of the complication that a municipality dealt with and what was needed was continuing improvement of policy to deal with the gaps.
“A municipality would go to court to attach the buildings because rates were not being paid and a decanting system was created that would allow you to move people into other buildings so the old buildings could be redeveloped.
“The scheme had relative success as it addressed one of the fundamental questions of what to do with the poor in particular and what to do with those who are not necessarily qualifying beneficiaries, including foreign nationals and those who earned more than allowed for government housing schemes.”
The party noted that there was regression in almost all metros in terms of service delivery and it was undertaking a comprehensive assessment of the state of local government.
Last month, Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Sihle Zikalala announced a national crackdown and government-wide probe into hijacked buildings.
Zikalala’s department would lead the task of identifying all hijacked buildings in the country as well as indicate what should be done with all the properties.
This would include the recovery of stolen or illegally transferred properties and hijacked buildings and further investigation and identification of more properties that are illegally occupied.
On other serious service delivery challenges, including the ongoing water and load shedding crisis, the NEC said it did not believe that these had created a trust deficit between citizens and the party.
The party said the 2022 survey said its successes could be measured by the number of households that had access to electricity, piped water while the population had risen by more than 10 million since 2012.
“When we recently did a manifesto review there was cynicism over whether the ANC was releasing the real numbers regarding access to services in terms of government performance.”
Tau said the release of the survey revealed that the government had performed better than the governing party had rated itself.
“If you want to rate us, if you want to measure us then do so against a set of indicators and if you look at the census numbers it indicates something fundamentally different from the cynicism over whether people trust us,” Tau said.