SDI BULLETIN – FEBRUARY 2006.

It has been a decisive week for the Federation of the Urban Poor, the South African affiliate in the SDI stable since September 2005.

BACKGROUND

It all began in Durban in January when the National Ministry of Housing agreed to work with the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP) and Shack Dwellers International to build 1000 houses in three months. At this meeting were representatives from numerous SDI affiliates as well as FEDUP activists from many parts of South Africa.

A caveat to the agreement was that 100 houses be built in Cape Town before 25th February. FEDUP asked its technical support organisation Utshani Fund to assist in the identification of a suitable site for these 100 houses. The national Ministry undertook to ensure that subsidies would be made available up-front via Utshani Fund, and would help to sort out procedural and technical obstacles in provincial and local government.

First the organisations identified Site C in Khayelitsha, but political tensions within the ANC, exacerbated by the upcoming elections, scuppered this idea. The next option was land in Stock Road, Philippi, which is owned by Utshani Fund. An NGO called People’s Environmental Planning conducted a technical assessment, however, and concluded that this land was not ready for development.

Utshani then examined its portfolio of unfinished projects and narrowed the list to three sites: Ruo Emoh in Mitchell’s Plain, VukuZenzele in Philippi and Ekupumleni in Philippi. A decision was taken to approach the Ekupumleni community and establish if they were interested in being the site for the 100 houses project.

Many factors were taken into consideration. On the plus side, the national Minister of Housing visited Ekupumleni in late 2005, and she and the Western Cape Minister of Housing are keen to see the development finished. Facilities to accommodate construction teams are available on the site, which includes the Derek Hanekom Resource Centre.

A factor weighing against the decision, however, was that the Ekupumleni development is next door to Victoria Mxenge, which is the base for a splinter group of leaders of the old Federation who have registered the “SA Homeless People’s Federation” as a Section 21 (non-profit) company under their directorship (henceforth SAHPF-S21). This group has regularly resorted to spoiling tactics in order to advance its own interests, and Utshani Fund did not wish to provoke a repeat performance.

In the end, it was felt that that the benefits for the community at Ekupumleni, who have been waiting for houses for 8 years, outweighed this risk. Utshani accordingly decided to approach the Ekupumleni community to float the idea of the 100 houses project.

Three things were immediately apparent. First, the overwhelming majority of families in the Ekupumleni community was in favour of the project. Second, the community did not have the capacity to provide the required 70 skilled and 80 unskilled workers. Third, Utshani needed concentrate on the financial aspect of the development and on the engagements with state institutions, and to outsource social facilitation.

Utshani decided to go ahead with the project, and with approval from the community and its management committee, appointed People’s Environmental Planning (who had been involved in the project for the earlier construction of 100 houses on the site) as project managers. They called on partner organisations to make up the shortfall in skilled and unskilled labour, approaching the Durban and Southern Cape branches of the Federation of the Urban Poor, Habitat for Humanity, and Men on the Side of the Road, a Cape Town NGO. They asked the Community Organisation Resource Centre to be on standby should social facilitation be required.

With assistance from the Special Adviser to the Minister, Utshani and FEDUP immediately started negotiations with the Provincial Housing Department, since South African housing policy requires that they authorise projects and disburse payments, even though funds are provided by the National Ministry.

INEVITABLE OBSTACLES

Predictably, at this point the initiative began to encounter obstacles. The province raised procedural objections. They required a formal project proposal, and insisted on the standard (cumbersome) procedures in terms beneficiary screening, geotechnical reports, and financial allocations.

Whilst Utshani negotiated with the provincial officials, the Ekupumleni community decided to start with construction, and Utshani agreed to provide limited bridging finance. After all, the purpose of the 100 Houses project was precisely to build houses quickly in order to expose institutional stumbling blocks, so that they could be addressed in partnership with government. Indeed, in this spirit of innovation, it appeared that the provincial authorities might be willing to compromise on technical issues.

Unfortunately, it was also predictable that the leadership of the SAHPF-S21 would try to thwart the 100 Houses project. They could not allow the people of Ekupumleni an independent choice in the matter; to do so would effectively question the point of their existence, which is to act as gatekeepers for all resources flowing into communities. The logic of their position demanded that they oppose any attempt by poor households, which they regarded as their clients, to make choices independently of them.

Moreover, to the SAHPF-S21, such an attempt at community independence amounted to a declaration of war – a war which they inevitably portrayed as between themselves and the NGOs supposedly ‘manipulating’ the people of Ekupumleni.

Utshani and SDI, however, were clear at all times that their task was to enable poor people to secure land and build affordable housing in such a way that the state delivers on its obligations to them. The NGO representatives were emphatic that they were neither the servants of the Ekupumleni community nor their leaders. Their only mission was to strive to create space for the Ekupumleni community to serve themselves, and to assist them if and when they had chosen to do so. And Ekupumleni did choose this path, after careful debate in several well-attended meetings.

So, while the provincial government hesitated, citing the same over-determined engineering requirements and procedures at the root of South Africa’s inability to facilitate housing delivery at the scale that is needed, the people of Ekupumleni, who have been waiting eight years for houses, began to take control of their own development. While the SAHPF-S21 used their party-political connections to try to block the development simply because they did not control it, the people of Ekupumleni did what any serious housing association is meant to do: they managed their membership and the professionals that they had contracted to assist them and got on with the business of building houses.

THE END OF ILLUSIONS

Work started on the site at 9 am on Monday 6th February. One week later, thirty foundations had been poured and twenty houses were at roof height. FEDUP builders from all over South Africa worked hard whilst the Ekupumleni community did everything they could to help.

This was to be the limit of progress this time around, financed once again from NGO and community rather than government resources. As quickly as it had begun, the 100 Houses project at Ekupumleni had to shut down.

In a meeting on the 8th of February at his offices, the provincial Minister of Housing reported that he had received objections to the 100 Houses project from SAHPF-S21 group. Three members of the SAHPF-S21 group had gone to see him earlier in the week. The provincial Minister therefore deferred his decision on the 100 Houses project to the next day.

On February 9th, the provincial Minister, the national Minister, and the Mayor of Cape Town decided that the 100 houses project must be shifted to Wallacedene, an area where Utshani has no significant community links and where traditional (i.e. non-Federation) community leaders are highly active. They made it clear that this was due to concerns about the political repercussions should they support the Ekupumleni community against the wishes of the SAHPF-S21.

Their decision not to support the 100 Houses project thus not only put a halt to housing delivery to the homeless poor of Ekupumleni. It also indirectly legitimated a group of community leaders who live outside the affected community but who put their determination to control local processes in front of the needs of 100 homeless families they claimed to serve.

The development in Ekupumleni has therefore come to a halt once again, without any assurances from provincial, national, or city government that they will assist a mobilised community that has taken the initiative to build their own houses. This leaves an outstanding debt of R360 000 that will either have to be carried by the twenty families who will pass the screening process and receive the houses, by the Ekupumleni Housing Association, or (most likely, as in the 1990s) by Utshani Fund itself.

LESSONS LEARNT

With this turn of events, the worms are out of the woodwork. Many questions that have been left hanging since the split in the Federation in 2005 and the subsequent closure of People’s Dialogue that same year have now been answered in practise. What was the basis of the split in the old Federation? Was the Federation model unworkable or was it being deliberately undermined by leaders with an agenda quite different to that of the majority? Did the People’s Dialogue Board really have the bigger picture in mind when they decided to close the NGO, or were they simply tired of being out of their depth and had run out of ideas as to how to resolve the governance and financial management problems that had begun to bedevil the agency?

Practise has demonstrated that decisions to close People’s Dialogue and cut off resources to thousands of organised poor families were based on a distorted consciousness of reality – a consciousness which became a real factor producing real distorting effects.

It is clear now that the Federation was not ‘split down the middle’, as the PD Board would have it. Instead, a group of leaders with severely diminished links to the grassroots, took advantage of accumulated contradictions to make a play for power in order to control the resources that the Federation process had generated over a fifteen-year period.

Not all has been lost, however. At least, thanks to the aborted 100 houses project, in the Ekupumleni community there is once again a self-conscious local group of slum-dwellers who have been goaded into action by a self-appointed leadership from outside their community that has pulled the plug on their development for no other reason except for the fact that they are not able to control it. This, of course, was what launched the original Federation in the first place.

WHAT NEXT?

These issues of community governance and of leadership and accountability in networks are painful ones to address, but they are nowhere near as complex as the challenges for the South African state thrown in stark relief by the first 7 days of the 100 houses project. The government has boldly and ambitiously assumed the responsibility of being a developmental state that is pro-poor and determined to use its limited space of operation to redistribute wealth in this country. The challenge it faces is how to institutionalise this agenda in a bureaucracy that is historically anti-poor, and that is now in service to a political leadership that often appears more concerned with the deracialisation of privilege than the abolition of poverty. There is not yet the willingness or capacity in state institutions to make the innovative shifts necessary to tackle poverty in a comprehensive way.

In their pursuit of alternative routes to tackle poverty, politicians with vision and commitment typically have few tools at their disposal to create the institutional sea change required for a full-frontal attack on poverty. Not infrequently, they try to force open the space by making demands for delivery and by putting their weight and authority behind progressive initiatives that promise innovation. Such is the case with the 100 Houses Initiative.

It is tempting for a social movement to take up such opportunities, but the 100 Houses project shows that it is fraught with danger. A Minister, or a Director General, or a Special Adviser opens doors with every intention of forcing change in ways that are favourable to the poor, but on the other side of the door the social movement comes face to face with officials and local politicians who are unsure of whether they are allowed to innovate and therefore insist on sticking to the ‘rules’. Others are naturally suspicious about change, or even regard social movements as threats to their authority. Every door that is opened therefore reveals a multitude of new doors. Unless the links between the poor and their political patron are strong indeed, it is unlikely that the latter will walk with them through the ad hoc process of confronting each new one. Unless transformative, pro-poor agendas are institutionalised, with a long-term commitment to solving problems together instead of on an ad hoc basis, this opening of space without entrenching value changes can backfire badly.

This is the problem that Utshani and the Federation faced in the 1990’s. Riding on the political support of National Ministers Slovo, Mthembi-Mahanyele, and Hanekom, they were able to forge ahead with innovations that required significant risk-taking. Once the risks were taken, however, institutions at local and provincial level – and even national-level bureaucrats – judged them according to the dominant ethos and methodology. These employees of the state therefore not only forced Utshani and the Federation to deal with these risks alone, but scaled up the level of risk by indirectly punishing the alliance for innovations that were encouraged by Ministers with vision and commitment for change. The innovations were always challenged and blocked because they fell outside of the institutional framework in which the bureaucrats and politicians were accustomed to operate, not because the bureaucrats and politicians were fundamentally opposed to them. Be that as it may, the net effect on communities of the urban poor, on meaningful policy change, on using housing to integrate poor people into cities as informed and enabled citizens and on the country’s capacity to deliver houses at the necessary scale was still counter-productive.