A tigress on the tightrope

LINDIWE Sisulu is redecorating. She directs a giant landscape painting towards a vacant wall in her spacious parliamentary office, but it is too big to hang. A similar painting rests in the corner — a Karoo vista of endless veld and enormous sky. Sisulu’s love of wide-open spaces should come as no surprise: space is the commodity she needs most if she is to make inroads into a staggering backlog of 2.3 million houses for South Africa’s urban poor. Add to that a dire shortage of available land in South Africa’s major cities and it is easy to see why Sisulu is fond of art depicting empty spaciousness. “My biggest challenge is having to start all over again,” said Sisulu during an interview at her office this week. Her previous term as housing minister— between 2004 and 2009 — produced, at its zenith, 270 000 houses a year, almost double the current rate. She said a similar effort was required now, but with an emphasis on bigger projects: “We must insist on megaprojects where we can use economies of scale — it will be cheaper and faster. We are the only country that is still building [houses] brick by brick, one by one, as if we have all the time in the world while the housing list grows.” As if to highlight the difficulties she faces, Sisulu was pitched into the midst of a huge housing controversy last month in her first week in office — the Lwandle eviction outside Cape Town. The demolition of about 250 shacks on state-owned land on the eve of a massive winter storm was the worst possible timing for a new government stung by accusations from some quarters that it had grown fat at the expense of the poor. The subsequent muddle over accommodating the evictees offers a grim insight into Sisulu’s future. Not only must she tackle the task of reducing the backlog, she must do so while walking a tightrope between landowners and the landless. So instead of her customary designer heels, a pair of Economic Freedom Fighters gumboots may be more useful.—