Zim houses 'not for officials'

2006-03-14 12:48

Harare - Government officials, politicians and their relatives who seized houses built for those who lost their homes under Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's controversial shack demolitions last year are to have them taken back, says a cabinet minister on Tuesday.

Ignatius Chombo, the minister of local government, said "undeserving" people had been allocated some of the new homes constructed under the official Operation Garikai (Settle and Prosper) scheme, launched in June last year.

Reports said that people found to have been wrongly allocated houses and plots "would have their properties withdrawn".

This was one of the few times a senior government official had admitted new homes had been wrongly acquired.

Undeserving people

Chombo said: "This programme is for those without residential addresses. We already have problems in Beitbridge, Bulawayo, Gwanda and other areas, where undeserving people have been allocated the houses."

Chombo was addressing a monitoring team for the Operation Garikai programme in Matabeleland North province, in the west of the country.

The government launched Operation Garikai just weeks after police began demolishing tens of thousands of shacks they said had been built without official permission.

The United Nations said that at least 700 000 people lost their homes and livelihoods in the clean-up, dubbed Operation Restore Order.

Lack of foreign currency

Initially, the government said more than a million new houses and plots would be established across Zimbabwe in the next four years.

But, the programme had run into big problems because of Zimbabwe's chronic lack of foreign currency as well as vital inputs such as building materials and fuel.

Official figures announced last month put the number of housing units built so far at 3 000.

Recent reports said the construction of new homes had all, but stopped and the authorities were now merely handing out housing plots.

Chombo said: "Councils should remove the names of their relatives, government officials, members of parliament, politicians and relatives from the operations waiting list."

He said the officials had to wait to be allocated housing plots.

- SAPA