Chairperson, Minister and Deputy Minister of Human Settlements, hon members of the House and distinguished guests, I am highly honoured by and grateful for the opportunity to participate in this policy and budget speech of the hon Minister for the Department of Human Settlements. My speech and input will be based on the following theme: Building sustainable human settlements and improving the quality of household life.
There are at least three key and mutually reinforcing systemic realities in our post-1994 democracy that continue daily to reproduce a racialised working class and to broaden poverty and marginalisation. The first is our economic growth trajectory, which remains locked into the same century-long trajectory, previously associated with minority rule.
The second reality is education and training. Eighteen years into our postapartheid democracy, we have become increasingly aware that the former creation of a single education dispensation masked the material reality of a highly unequal and inequitable system that actively reproduced enormous race, class and gender inequalities.
The third reality is the spatial reproduction of racialised, class-based and gender-based underdevelopment and inequality. Just as with education, where the formal establishment of a unitary system disguised an actual highly unequal reality, so it is with the geographical and spatial features of postapartheid South Africa.
Formally, we now have a unitary South Africa and single citizenship, where we all have rights of free mobility and access. We have formally abolished the Group Areas Act, ethnic zoning, influx control, labour preference areas, curfews and Bantustans. What was once actively and systematically planned by apartheid architects to control the location and mobility of the black majority is now perpetuated on so-called automatic pilot by the following: the land and housing market; speculative property development dominating town planning; the power of big capital in suburban elites to influence the nature of development; and the new liberal "global city" paradigm, which has dominated the administration of many of our cities, overemphasising tourism and global connectivity, international conference centres and the hosting of global events to the relative detriment of transforming the lives of the majority of actual metro citizens.
This perpetuation is further supported by the skewed infrastructure grid - that is water, roads, energy and information technology -being directed towards serving the interests of the enclaves of privilege and the water, energy and freight logistic needs of monopolistic capital, lowering the costs of doing business for business; by communal land ownership being dominated by conservative patriarchal traditional leadership, in which nominal citizens are reduced to the status of traditional subjects, with a particularly discriminatory impact on rural women; by the failures of our willing-buyer, willing-seller land reform programme and the general failure to take seriously rural development based on small family and co-operative holdings; and by the perpetuation of dormitory and informal township settlement patterns distant from work, quality education and major Public Service resources.
The 3,1 million RDP houses we have built over 18 years have unintentionally also reinforced the reproduction of these spatial inequalities. The combined impact of all these spatial factors, many of which have been accelerated in the post-1994 period, have compounded and entrenched monopolistic capital's hegemony on our country while reproducing systemic spatial and excessively racialised inequality.
Exorbitant land and property prices in favourable localities, for instance, are much more prohibitive barriers to entry for the largely black urban and rural poor working class than any functional apartheid pass office. It is my respectful view that a continued post-1994 reproduction of dormitory and informal township settlement patterns lies at the heart of many grave challenges.
These perpetuated spatial realities play an active role in locking the majority of our people into overcrowded and underresourced public services such as schools, colleges, clinics and such infrastructure. They also place a huge mobility and access burden in terms of time, personal security and money on the working class and poor, especially on women, as they seek to access education or work.
I deliberately highlight all these negatives conscious of the fact that this department has successfully introduced the Breaking New Ground, BNG, policy, which seeks to reverse the aforementioned anomalies. In our province, the hon MEC for human settlements, Siphosezwe Masango, has recently described his department as "the tool that can be used to effectively build a truly nonracial South Africa".
We need to move with speed on the BNG projects. It is my pleasure to report that in Mpumalanga we recently completed Klarinet as a good model for the deliberate creation of an integrated and sustainable human settlement. I believe we also need to implement the accreditation framework that seeks to empower municipalities to administer the national housing programme. In fact, we need to review it in order to determine whether the incremental delegation of housing functions to local government is taking place in a manner that will ensure that those municipalities that can do deliver quality human settlements that will improve the quality of household life and strengthen the dignity of South Africans on an equal and equitable basis. As a matter of consistency with the Constitution, the accreditation of municipalities to administer the national housing programme has been emphasised as the key government priority in support of the overall principle of co-operative governance. We all know that the rationale behind this move towards accreditation is rooted in the Constitution and can be found further within the logic of good and co-operative governance and the current constraints in housing delivery processes, which are leading to decelerated delivery and persistent provincial budget roll-overs.
In December 2007, at the ANC's 52nd national conference in Polokwane, we resolved to be a democratic and developmental society, in keeping with our Bill of Rights and as enshrined in Chapter 2 of our Constitution. As Mpumalanga province, we are committed to the principles of BNG and we support the Budget Vote of the MEC for 2012-13. We will oversee our provincial department of human settlements. We will ensure that it procures land and invites all sector departments so that they can plan collectively. In all their endeavours, we will also assess whether it does involve our traditional leaders and the private sector, in particular the finance sector, as well as employers, so that the South African dream can become a reality. Together we can build sustainable human settlements and improve the quality of household life.