Stop playing party politics

YOUR front page story “How many people live” (July 6) highlights the disgraceful situation that the housing shortage in the Western Cape is, and that this province consistently under-spends its housing budget. It is past time that politicians, both at national and local levels, stopped playing party politics with the lives of the poor.

The DA fears an influx of “refugees” from the Eastern Cape and, in turn, the ANC refuses to give the DA credit for anything. The continual bleat is shortage of land and shortage of money, neither of which is true. There is, sadly, a massive shortage of political will from the DA and the ANC to deal with this crisis.

As examples, Youngsfield and Wingfield – two redundant military bases from the apartheid era, title to which is held by the dysfunctional Department of Public Works – are perfectly located for social housing, to replace the shacks in Khayelitsha and Dunoon. As China and many other countries have proved, construction of social housing serves job creation and poverty alleviation. Decent housing for the poor is cheap-at-theprice as the stimulus for economic development.

Elsewhere, on page 16, you also reported that the City of Cape Town is spending R6.5 billion on infrastructure and has (rightly) prioritised digital innovation and the installation of fibre-optic cabling.

Yes, let’s aim to make Cape Town a world-ranking city. That ambition is, however, doomed to fail when a sizeable proportion of our citizens still lives in shacks and filthy squalor more than 20 years after the end of apartheid.

More than 17 years have elapsed since the Constitutional Court’s Irene Grootboom judgment found the City of Cape Town to be derelict in its obligations. Given the attitudes and failures of DA city councillors, it is not surprising that housing protests regularly erupt in Hout Bay, Masiphumelele, and elsewhere.