Monday, September 6, 2010 - Mpumalanga 
| eviction of illegal Rdp house owners |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by Sydney Masinga |
| 05 February 2010 |
|
People who have il-legally bought or occupied RDP houses in Mpumalanga have been warned that the Department of Human Settlements will be track-ing them down and evicting them before the end of the year. Addressing a press conference in Nelspruit on Tuesday, provincial MEC for Human Settlements Ma-dala Masuku said he would under-take random door-to-door visits in different municipalities as part of an audit of people occupying gov-ernment’s low-cost houses. The MEC will verify whether the people living in the houses are legitimate benefciaries.“The audits will begin in Te-kwane North [outside Nelspruit] and we will defnitely kick out all the people who have illegally bought houses. “We have a situation where our people have gone back to live in shacks because they have sold their RDP houses to greedy indi-viduals. That is going to come to an end this year,” said Masuku.A resident of Tekwane North, Khethiwe Lekhuleni, told the MEC that most of the RDP houses which were sold in the area had been sold by the department’s of- fcials. “He must investigate the peo-ple in the department. He will be blown away by the number of cor-rupt offcials who became rich by selling RDP houses,” said Lekhu-leni. Masuku said anyone with evi-dence of involvement by offcials in the illegal selling of RDP hous-es should come forward. He added that by the end of April, when the 2009/2010 fnan-cial year comes to an end, the department will have delivered 2 626 housing units that had been abandoned by contractors in the previous fnancial year. “During the policy budget speech last year, I committed that the department will fnish all 4 132 incomplete houses while deliver-ing 10 547 new units. To date, we have delivered 2 626 units and 1 506 are currently under construc- tion,” he said. “We have also delivered 5 965 new housing units in the last nine months. The reason we have not delivered all the houses we com-mitted to is because we had to overcome challenges like the ser-vice delivery protests in a number of municipalities, bad weather conditions and the blacklisting of poorly performing contractors.”Masuku said the department had already spent 73 percent of its R795 million budget, with the re-maining R212 million to be spent within the next three months. “There are two special projects at Rooikoppen and Verulam, in Lekwa and Umjindi local munici-palities respectively. We commit ourselves that these funds will be spent as planned to deliver much-needed shelter to our people,” Masuku said. |
Nkomazi Voice
PO Box 1453
Shongwe Mission, Mpumalanga, 1331
Republic of South Africa
editor@NkomaziVoice.com
Assistant Editor
Collin Mabaso (082) 641 8783
General Manager
Vusi Kubayi (076) 430 8057
Distribution
Mduduzi Nkosi (072) 790 1193
Senior Journalist
Mandla Khoza (076) 583 6110
Layout & Design
Lynette Strauss (076) 296 2490
Lynette Strauss (015) 793 0692
Kruger Park Times and Hoedspruit Week
