Illegal settlements regularised as Garikai fails

al stands since last year’s slum clearance operation.
Official sources said this week that due to the political sensitivity of the issue, especially for the ruling Zanu (PF) party which has promised to deliver more than 92,450 houses it demolished last year during the brutal army-led Operation Murambatsvina, local authorities had no option but to formalise the settlements.
Hundreds of squatters have haphazardly allocated themselves stands along the main Bulawayo road, throwing a poser at the Harare City Council’s town planners and those of the neighbouring Zvimba Rural District Council.
The squatters started moving into the area just as other Zanu (PF) supporters began seizing peri-urban farms around Harare in the name of land hunger.
“They (the local authorities) have no option but to try to regularise the settlements. They cannot evict these people because they moved there with the support of the government and some of them have already put up permanent structures,” a source close to the National Housing Taskforce told The Zimbabwean.
The regularisation of the settlement will involve changing the areas’ land use from agriculture to residential and providing urban services such as sewerage, water, electricity and roads.
Currently the squatters are putting up all forms of housing structures, which vary from plastic and cardboard box dwellings to pole-and-dagga houses. Only a few have built proper housing units, although there is no piped water, sewer connections, roads or electricity.
“The main problem is that the regularisation of the settlement would involve the destruction of some of the structures to make way for roads as well as water and sewerage reticulation systems,” the source said.
Contrary to government statements, almost none of the victims of Operation Murambatsvina have benefited from the rebuilding, with only some 3,325 houses constructed – compared to the 92,460 homes destroyed during Operation Murambatsvina – and construction has ground to a halt in many areas.
Moreover, although the government has presented Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle as a programme under which houses are built by government for victims of Operation Murambatsvina, in reality many people are being allocated small bare plots of land, often without access to water and sanitation, on which they have to build their own homes with no assistance.
Harare municipality spokesman Percy Toriro this week declined to say what the council plans to do about the illegal settlements, saying most of them were outside the boundaries of the city and therefore outside its jurisdiction.
He said the Zvimba Rural District Council was responsible for the area occupied by the squatters.
The mushrooming of the illegal settlements has hit the sale of new residential stands at two nearby housing projects because prospective buyers are hesitant to build homes next to an unplanned settlement. – Own correspondent