LIVING ON THE EDGE: HARARE’S IRREGULAR SETTLEMENTS
Residents cross a flooded road near an informal housing project
FOR Tonderai Tsabora, January 4 will forever be etched in his memory.
It was a day Mother Nature unleashed her fury upon Harare, as the heavens opened up and dumped buckets of rain.
Tsabora could only watch helplessly as his two-roomed home in the Jacha area of Epworth was flooded.
Many houses like his — built on land not suited for housing development — crumbled, as their possessions were turned into debris, leaving their once-proud owners counting their losses.
Tsabora found himself standing amid the wreckage.
Furniture, appliances and clothes, among many of his valuables, were all swallowed by the storm’s fury, leaving behind a hollow shell of a home and a gaping void in Tsabora’s life. He took the little he could salvage and left. “After spending the night in the flooded ruins of his home, he gathered the few remaining possessions . . . and left the place,” said Tawanda Simbarashe, a neighbour, whose home was also damaged.
“We are not sure of his whereabouts.” Tsabora, he said, had recently purchased the stand from its previous owner, who apparently had not disclosed to him that the land was susceptible to flooding.
“His house was actually blocking the passage of the waterway and that is why the previous owner sold the place,” said Simbarashe.
Residents from other parts of Epworth had since christened the neighbourhood “Waterfalls”.
The previous owner had told Tsabora that the area was about to be surveyed by the local authority ahead of regularisation, ostensibly to induce him into buying the property.
Hazards
This is, however, a common story in most of the unplanned settlements in and around Harare.
The recent incessant rains exposed the folly of living in undesignated settlements and the vulnerability of those clinging to the fringes of an urban settlement struggling to contain its sprawl.
Across the province in Budiriro, 59 homeowners were left devastated and distraught
on the same night after their houses were swept away by flash floods.
A six-year-old boy unfortunately died after being washed away by a nearby flooded river.
Harare’s hidden corners
Beyond Harare’s bustling streets and avenues in properly planned settlements lies a different reality — a patchwork of irregular settlements stitched together by desperate homeseekers.
Here, beneath the shadow of the capital city’s affluence, life is precarious for thousands of homeowners in illegal settlements, most of whom were victims of land barons.
In these settlements, basic amenities are barely available for many.
Access to clean, running water is a luxury. Shallow and unprotected wells, as well as public boreholes, are supposed to provide succour to these parched areas.
Basic sanitation is non-existent, heightening the risk of water-borne diseases and infectious illnesses.
The lack of proper healthcare facilities further exacerbates the situation.
Electricity, a symbol of modern life, is unavailable.
The homes are often makeshift structures that offer little protection from the vagaries of harsh weather, while overcrowding is common.
Yet, life persists.
Susan Mlambo-Chaputika, whose home
in Budiriro was recently destroyed, told The Sunday Mail of Harare City Council’s alleged complicity in allocating them residential stands on unsuitable land.
“We got these stands through the Marange Cooperative, which was handed the stands by the Harare City Council in 2005,” she said.
“We started experiencing the flooding problems in 2006.”
Genesis
Since the turn of the millennium, most settlements have been developing on land that was either designated as greenbelts or for future expansion of the capital city.
The trend began worse after the adoption of the 2012 National Housing Policy — developed after the Government convened the National Housing Convention in 2009 — which resulted in policies such as incremental and parallel development, through which housing construction could be carried out simultaneously with the provision of services.
However, while housing development proceeded, local authorities failed to provide both onsite and offsite infrastructure such as water and sewer, among other services.
Illegal settlements began to mushroom as it was increasingly difficult to distinguish them from legal ones that did not have the requisite infrastructure of planned settlements.
Inevitably, this led to an explosion of new settlements with little to no basic infrastructure. Most were also established on unsuitable land.
Today, Harare, once a planned city with defined residential, commercial and industrial zones, is now battling the consequences of unplanned growth.
Irregular settlements, estimated to house thousands of residents, have choked transportation corridors, strained waterways and sanitation systems, and exacerbated environmental concerns.
Audit
In 2017, the Government constituted a Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Justice Tendai Uchena, to investigate the sale of State land in and around urban areas countrywide between 2005 and 2019.
Justice Uchena’s final report exposed jarring irregularities, including cases of land being acquired below market value and then resold at inflated prices; double allocations of land and questionable deals with private developers; lack of transparency and accountability in the sale of land; and environmental concerns due to unplanned development on some acquired land.
Crucially the commission established that: “The total value of the farms (allocated to homeowners) according to the ministry responsible for Local Government is US$3 004 368 931.
“However, the Government has recovered less than 10 percent of the intrinsic value of the land and is owed almost US$3 billion by beneficiaries of urban State land.
“To be exact, the total full prejudice to the State stands at US$2 977 072 819.”
The commission also established that most residential estates on urban State land had no services such as roads, water and sewer reticulation as well as other amenities.
It also found that in some cases housing development was taking place without approved engineering designs for roads, water and sewer reticulation.
“The commission found that, for infrastructural development in urban settlements, the country needs US$1 420 241 598 for roads, US$857 721 234 for sewer and US$226 315 016 for water.
“This adds up to US$2 504 277 849 for the whole infrastructural needs of urban State land in and around urban areas since 2005.”
Outdated
City authorities contend that Harare’s decades-old masterplan is outdated and cannot be used to deal with nascent problems such as the expansion of irregular settlements in the city.
Citing its inability to challenges like the mushrooming of irregular settlements, city fathers say they are undertaking a comprehensive overhaul of the blueprint.
“You cannot run a city without a masterplan, like the case of Harare, where the
1994-96 masterplan is being used, which is outdated in terms of its policies and proposals,” said Harare’s chief development control officer Mr James Mazvimba.
“We need to address the current issues of vending, traffic and housing, which were non-existent back then.
“When you look around, there are a lot of new issues and challenges to do with housing.
“We need a guideline; a masterplan that speaks to those issues.”
Plan
Last week, the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works convened a two-day meeting in Harare with all 92 local authorities geared to find ways to address haphazard settlements.
Addressing the meeting, Local Government Minister Winston Chitando said: “Commercial, industrial and residential zones were developed along racial lines.
“In fact, the planning system was and is guided by the British planning system, hence our cities and planning thoughts are characterised as European. They had a lean population in the cities as opposed to us. We now need to address such shortcomings to suit us.”
Adoption of technology, he said, is also critical to sync with global trends.
“We need to embrace new planning strategies and concepts such as the compact, green and smart city concepts as we modernise our settlements.
“These strategies embrace new technologies and smart energy sources.
“Indeed, urban areas or functional settlements need to manage their development, supporting economic competitiveness, while enhancing social cohesion, environmental sustainability and an increased quality of life of their citizens.
“With the development of new technological innovations — mainly ICTs; for example, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) — the concept of the ‘smart city’ can emerge as a means to achieve more efficient and sustainable cities.”
While authorities try to find a solution to the growing problem, despairing and desperate homeseekers in Tsabora’s position can only wait for salvation.
◆ X: @TheseusShambare