MBARE - Shelter is a basic human right. Especially families need sufficient living space where they can live, eat, rest, sleep, pray, talk and work together, with privacy and protection from intruders, robbers and thieves. In some of Mbares notorious hostels privacy is unknown: some of the rooms, meant as mere sleeping quarters for alleged bachelors, are shared by The Rhodesians wanted to keep the number of Africans in the white cities down, so they denied their workers family accommodation. The proper place for them, so they decreed in their high-handed fashion, was the rural village.
The Zanu (PF) government descended with brutal military force in 2005 and destroyed much family living space, with the same wrong assumption: Africans have rural homes and that is where they should be. As a matter of fact, there are many black people born in town and thoroughly urbanised who have never lived in a traditional village. There are many who came as migrant labourers from Mozambique and Malawi: they, too, as well as their children and grandchildren, have no rural homes in this country.
And now the new city council may well make the same terrible mistake again. The hostels have to refurbished and renovated. True. They are in shocking condition. The sewage runs down the stairs, there is now water and electricity, windows and doors are broken, the walls are grimy and dirty.
Repairs are urgently needed. But how to do it? If you remove the people in the meantime, where do you move them to? Id the job is done, can we be certain that the former occupants will be allowed back? Or will some party people with the right connections squeeze in and leave the actual owners out in the cold, homeless and unsheltered?
NGOs can perhaps help with the costs. But they cannot do anything about corruption (Uori nechizivano!).
This is one of the great failures of the past ruling party: the chefs have taken over the beautiful mansions of their enemies, utterly failed to provide housing for all by the year 2000 (or even 2010).
It is the great shame of this proud globalised world which has the technical means to build and destroy anything that it tolerates a large part of urban humanity to live like rats. We lack the moral strength, the sense of justice and compassion, to take decisive action about this huge scandal you can observe in all the big urban centres of the 3rd world. But not only there, homeless people can be found everywhere, even in the 2nd and 1st world, even among the super-rich.
In the meantime the poor fight over living space. In-laws kick their widowed daughters-in-law out on to the street. Old men are pushed out by half-brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of different wives fighting each other, step-children fighting the real children.
We need a productive, functioning economy again which can produce enough surplus so as to build housing even for the low-income groups which is not big business. But housing must not fall into the hands of party politicians who will want to give houses to their supporters for loyal service. In that way they would buy free citizens, deprive them of their freedom to choose and turn them into slaves. The much acclaimed national sovereignty would become worthless.
Post published in: Opinions