"You're hired!" Zuma tells Sexwale
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Now go out and solve the housing crisis, Tokyo. Details, analysis about duo facing up to South Africa’s biggest property problem.
South Africans will have to get used to the term the Department of Human Settlements formerly known as the Department of Housing and its new Minister Tokyo Sexwale.
Sexwale was sworn into President Jacob Zuma's cabinet on Sunday and is tasked with taking a holistic approach to dealing with housing issues in South Africa.
His deputy, Zou Kota has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1994 and chairperson of the Housing Portfolio Committee. Her experience with the complex arena of housing should be useful to former businessman Sexwale even if the committee has at times underperformed. In the last parliamentary session, the committee refused to take part blame for the xenophobic violence that broke out in South Africa in May 2008. In a survey of affected areas by the Human Sciences Research Council, many respondents said competition for housing and the perception that foreigners were "jumping the queue" had sparked violence in some areas.
Sexwale was a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the African National Congress (ANC) prior to his appointment and was formerly the Premier of Gauteng. He spent many years on Robben Island after being captured carrying out military activities as a commander of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe.
Human Settlements is a broad concept and entails that houses should be built closer to where people can have easy access to basic amenities. The Minister will have to work creatively to find ways of building sustainable settlements and also empower recipients to look after those settlements as part of building their own communities, said one Realestateweb reader.
Government has committed itself to ridding the country of shacks and informal settlement areas, a phenomenon that sprung up largely in the post-1994 period. Some NGOs and university think tanks, however, argue that these areas should be upgraded rather than demolished.
The reality is that informal settlements are growing, the influx of slums resulting from the rapid rate of urbanisation and migration. Plans need to put in place to the supply of housing stock match demand for housing, he said.
