Siyabonga Sesant
Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane has expressed his disappointment at what he said was the political instability and uncertainty in Nelson Mandela Bay.
He described the situation in the metro as terrible.
Mabuyane was speaking at the launch of a three-day Provincial Human Settlements Indaba at Nelson Mandela University on Wednesday.
Eastern Cape Human Settlements MEC Siphokazi Lusithi and Bay Executive Mayor Gary van Niekerk were also in attendance.
Mabuyane said for the past decade, millions in funding had gone unspent, instead of being used to build houses.
"For 10 years, millions of millions - at some point almost half-a-billion [rand] - was not spent in Nelson Mandela [Bay] because of the instability in local government.
Our people are looking for houses and the backlog is accumulating. So, the problem of instability and the manner in which we are governing this area is terrible.
It creates this political instability and uncertainty on policy issues... even an easy decision that must be taken cannot be taken on time," he said.
The Premier said, however, the province managed to make some inroads.
"In the last financial year alone we delivered 5338 houses.
The construction of these housing units also came with the economic opportunities for people in the construction sector as government spends multi-billion rand budgets to implement housing projects," said Mabuyane.
Mayor Van Niekerk said some communities have reached a point of desperation.
"I would like to appeal to you that we must come up with tangible solutions to fast-track housing delivery," he said.
"It's nowadays not surprising to hear from communities that their pleas are falling on deaf ears; they've reached a point of desperation and see no other option to engage in civil disobedience by stoning and burning state property."
MEC Lusithi said the provincial department has built more than 400,000 housing units in the past two decades.
"We've changed the landscape of the province - everywhere you go you see there are houses.
But the intention of the summit now is to give expression to not only housing units but to integrated human settlements."
