I think the South African government is not only extremely greedy, I think it’s also remarkably selfish, ill informed and grossly incompetent. Of course my comments might apply not only to the ANC government but to the previous Nationalist Party government as well.
Just a day or two later, the Minister of Public Works, Geoff Doidge announced that the government had recently discovered 33 000 buildings that it owned but didn’t actually know that these buildings belonged to them.
Worse still, it found that it owned a couple of wine farms among the 108 000 properties that now appear on the government asset register. It also owns 50% of Port St Johns through an organisation called the South African Bantu Trust, pointing the finger of inefficiency as boldly at the past government as it does at the current one.
The Department of Public Works has been trying to compile a detailed register of all the properties that belong to the government and then decide what to do with those properties.
That’s a good thing I guess but my question remains: How is it possible to have no record of the buildings and properties you own? Did the ‘new’ government, in power since 1994, simply lose the information or did the previous government keep no proper records?
I reckon that one government official will blame another government official and the excuses ball will be bounced around and around and around in a true state of perpetual motion. For that’s a skill that every government official has mastered: blaming someone else.
What do some of the statistics in the incomplete asset register show?
Government owns several “very profitable” and very well known wine farms in the Western Cape. It owns lots of property in Hout Bay, where, just last week violent protests erupted as squatters protested about forcibly being removed from land there. (Hello Apartheid).
Doidge told amused and astonished delegates attending the ANC’s Progressive Business Forum in Durban last week that some of the buildings were being leased for just one rand a year to the current tenants. And so far, the Government Immovable Asset Management Act applies only to national and provincial levels of government and not to local government.
So the only properties appearing in this asset register are those that belong to the National and Provincial authorities. We’ve no idea what land the municipal authorities own and I doubt that they have any clear idea either.
In time, Doidge says, the Act will be amended and this will compel the local authorities to compile an accurate asset register of their properties too.
Meanwhile, the ANC’s best known resident clown, Julius Malema was calling for a land revolution based on the principle that land owners be compelled to accept whatever price the government offered them for the land they wanted to expropriate.
You can see why Malema’s considered such a clown, can’t you? He can’t foresee what such a step would mean for land values, the local economy, international investment or the job market. How can he when the best he could do was to muster a G for woodworking?
Of course the naughty little boy was promptly cuffed around the ear by President Jacob Zuma and remanded to the dunce’s corner where he belongs alongside his matric marks, but be that as it may. And, he was comforted by another stalwart comedienne, Winne Madikizela-Mandela, who told him that every little boy gets punished by his father, or something equally idiotic.
Predictably there was an enormous backlash from an angry public who reacted, rather stupidly I believe, to Malema’s remarks in a most vitriolic way. The public reaction was easily as daft as those people who got upset about John Cleese’s movie The Life of Brian and banned it. I seem to recall they were members of a government too.
But let’s put these bits and pieces into some kind of order.
First of all, South Africa needs land for development and, more importantly, land for housing. But it owns land in Hout Bay where there are thousands of squatters living in poverty. Wouldn’t the sensible option be to simply develop the land for these squatters in an organised, controlled and sensible fashion?
Government owns very profitable and well-known wine farms. Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to sell those wine farms and use the money to buy more land or, better still, create a community co-operative to allow the previously-disadvantaged workers to have a real stake in a wine farm that’s making money now. Then the whole community would be better off wouldn’t it?
Government currently owns an additional 33 000 buildings that it recently ‘found’. That’s a huge amount of property and much of it, no doubt, is in an extremely tatty shape because these buildings couldn’t have been maintained properly without somebody paying the maintenance bills. And government wasn’t paying them.
So wouldn’t it be a sensible idea to refurbish these evidently tatty and run down buildings into some kind of high density housing project where squatters, the homeless and the indigent could be housed in more humane conditions than living on the streets under a sack?
If each building accommodated just 50 people then 1,65-million of them would have a proper place to live and the huge housing backlog would be slashed.
Really, these suggestions are not rocket science are they? I mean I can understand why the government would own an enormous air force base because, perhaps, it may have thought it needed it when flying covert operations to circumvent sanctions against an Apartheid regime.
But why keep this air force base now.
Rather turn it into something useful, like a game farm for the community so that it will provide jobs, create wealth and simultaneously provide a sustainable income for the local authority. Then collect the taxes due when the operation becomes profitable.
Amid all this noise over land reform, all the proof that government land reform measures have failed, all the evidence that the government is failing to deliver essential and basic services to the people surely we can’t go on vacillating in the same way we have been doing for the past 16 years.
In fact, surely we can’t have a government that will continue enriching itself for time immemorial as the Nationalist Party did and as the ANC currently is doing.
Surely we, the people of South Africa, have to mobilise our votes and then vote for change, vote for efficiency and vote for sustainability.
But then, who would we vote for?
Because that’s the one question I can’t answer yet.
*Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn’t pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.
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