Africa-Press – Namibia. THE Windhoek municipality says it will no longer tolerate illegal land occupation by residents in the informal settlements.
Windhoek mayor Job Amupanda yesterday said the municipality is also not “scared” to deal with unruly “chance takers”, who instigate residents into occupying land illegally.
He made these remarks at a media briefing yesterday when he announced the outcome of a five-day workshop convened last week to find tangible solutions to the land and housing question in Windhoek.
The workshop resolved a myriad proposals to improve the operations of the municipality in terms of land administration and implementation of projects aimed at accelerating land servicing and housing.
Last week’s workshop was triggered by the increase in incidents of illegal land occupation, which started late last year at various informal settlements in Windhoek.
At the conclusion of last week’s workshop, Amupanda said the municipality now has a concrete framework on how to address the question of unavailability of land and housing and would, therefore, not tolerate unruliness.
“This is something that we are going to fight for as councillors […] we have seen that there are some chance takers who thought that we are maybe scared of going into the communities. We are not scared of those chance takers, we will face them and tell them that we are not here to joke,” he said.
Among the resolutions taken at last week’s land workshop, Amupuanda said, the municipality has now adopted a position of “zero tolerance to illegal land occupation”.
The zero tolerance on illegal land occupation is aimed at encouraging residents to apply for land through legal means, Amupanda said. He added that the municipality will now work on refining some of its administrative processes dealing with land and housing.
This includes cleaning up the waiting lists and consolidating them into one master list, which will be accessible to the public. The municipality will also establish a project management task force to track the implementation of all land and housing projects in the city.
Another resolution is to establish a company, to be known as Nova Actus Holdings (Pty) Ltd, which would own a subsidiary that deals with land servicing and housing.
This will reduce the municipality’s reliance on property developers for the servicing of land. This company will, therefore, be used by the municipality to secure funding for housing development and insurance.
Within six months, the municipality will come up with a funding proposal on housing and housing insurance. He said the council last week also resolved to finalise negotiations with the central government to write off more than N$700 million of historical debt.
This will improve the municipality’s liquidity and open up opportunities for the municipality to secure loans from financial institutions for the purposes of housing. The municipality will further accelerate the implementation of the flexible land tenure system, Amupanda said.
Amupanda yesterday said there are, however, other factors that are beyond the municipality’s control that are hampering the municipality’s efforts to accelerate land servicing and housing.
To this challenge, Amupanda said last week’s workshop resolved that the municipality should engage the regional and central government to propose the reforms to the local authority legislation to improve the governance of local authorities.
He said this will be done to ensure that the municipality addresses bottlenecks in terms of implementing various issues that would not necessarily require ministerial approval.
Amupanda added that the municipality also wants to control the rate of urban migration to reduce pressure on the municipality to provide land and housing to residents.
“We call on residents to remain calm and patient. We are not here for one year. It is only the mayor, the deputy and members of the management committee that are here for one year. We ask you to remain assured that the council is committed to address the issue of land and housing in a systematic, financially viable and sustainable manner,” he said.
