LETTER FROM JOHN TURNER

Hastings UK 24/7/05

Dear Friends:

After many years of personal experience in the field of housing in
developing countries, I cannot remain silent while Robert Mugabe and
his cohorts destroy the homes and precarious livelihoods of Zimbabwe¹s
citizens while invoking colonial planning regulations designed to
exclude natives not needed for servicing the colonisers.
Countries with large proportions of high-income citizens and
profitable enterprises, can afford to subsidise those who cannot afford
market housing prices. Most citizens of less developed countries have
far lower incomes and their governments have very low per capita
revenues. Therefore only small favoured minorities can be subsidised.
Since the great majority cannot afford authorised development they must
house themselves in any way they can. Those who can afford it build on
cheap illegally sold plots with few services or n one at all. The great
majority who cannot must build or rent shacks on squatted land.
Attempting to justify the destruction of people¹s property without
due warning or compensation is an ignorant and criminally cynical
colonial hangover. Ignorance of internationally recognised housing
policy changes over the past 30 years cannot be excused, let alone used
to cover criminality. Since the early 1970s the United Nations and the
World Bank have promoted realistic housing policies: by ensuring the
availability of land at affordable prices and providing services by
stages, low and moderate-income people are enabled to do what they are
capable and willing to do for themselves. All international development
agencies of which I am aware over the past 45 years have endorsed
enabling policies.
I fear that Mugabe¹s pretexts will continue to be used by national
governments of low-income countries that have yet to realise the
counter-productivity of imposing inappropriate colonial policies.
Revulsion at the suffering perpetrated by such policies, in Zimbabwe or
elsewhere, can have no effect unless accompanied by reminders of
lessons already learned.

Regards, greetings and hopes for renewal,

John F. C. Turner.
Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Prize), Stockholm 1988
United Nations Habitat Scroll of Honour, New York 1992