LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Housing policy must reward agency and choice

I agree with the thrust of Bernard Benson’s argument, “Housing policy needs more than good intentions” (July 15), in his response to my letter, though he begins by attributing to me a proposition that is not in fact mine: “I’d like to know what Michael Morris means by ‘everyone’s right to adequate housing’.”

I referred to section 26(1) of the bill of rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.” Section 26(2) says: “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.”

What I wrote was that “unless the property developer and the labourer can more or less recognise themselves and their interests in policy instruments directed at overcoming the apartheid spatial plan and everyone’s right to ‘adequate housing’, the truly transformative answer to our long-delayed reimagining of a liberated or democratic or just South Africa will remain elusive”.

In citing the UK experience, where he says once state-provided housing was “sold to their occupiers at a discount … they gained a new lease of life and became a valuable asset”, I think Benson is driving at the same point. This is very much what I had in mind in arguing that policy instruments must “match the dynamism and choice of today’s free society rather than reverting to the restrictive, stifling conditions of the unfree one that preceded it”.

This is partly to say that, as Benson warns, “throwing public money at a problem doesn’t always fix it”.

Michael Morris

Institute of Race Relations

June 30 presents SA with different national dialogue

In June 2024 President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his grand National Dialogue. This would result in a “social compact”, he said, that would enable citizens and government to work together to define and fix the country’s problems once and for all.

In his state of the nation speech in February 2022, the president also said that within 100 days he would have a social compact between government, labour, business and civil society that would fix the country’s economy once and for all.

Yet no such “social compacts” have emerged. The National Dialogue remains as dead a duck as it was when it was announced. Our country is plagued by worsening societal problems, and our lacklustre economy does nothing but render South Africans poorer by the day.

Inconsequential “talks about talks”, rambling rhetoric and sugar-coated platitudes have been prevalent features of Ramaphosa’s presidency.

However, on June 30 the country was presented with a quite different kind of dialogue, one that drowned out his whimpering National Dialogue. It was undertaken by protesters willing to walk their talk and generated an urgent and costly response from the president and his usually “snail pace” government of national unity.

Some of the motives, objectives and actions of the June 30 protesters may be questionable, but there can be no denying that rising civil unrest across the country — whether about illegal foreign nationals, drug trafficking, water and power shortages, sewage in the streets, crime and high-level corruption within the criminal justice and political systems, unemployment or homelessness — is collectively a reflection of a chronic failure of governance and oversight.

This tragic failure of the ANC-led government and its president, with their policies of self-serving political patronage, has severe consequences for future generations of South Africans.

As the government continues to fail to actively deal with the very crises its own incompetence and neglect have created, the nation faces a lot more of this socially and economically damaging kind of disruptive dialogue. These widespread civil protestations have not gone unnoticed by the international media and investment communities.

They will also be aware of the lengths the president is prepared to go to evade scrutiny of his Phala Phala involvement; his shameful appointment to the cabinet of a known corrupt individual responsible for a R302bn budget for social development; and other daily scandals that are rocking our nation and doing irreparable harm to the reputation and credibility of the president, his government and our country.

David Gant

Kenilworth

Defining organisations by race in 2026 is tragic

John Dludlu’s most recent column, “Black institutions need renewal, not chronic internal battles” (July 22), refers. Maybe if they put a few white ous in there, your “black” organisations may work!

Jokes aside, isn’t it a great pity we are still defining institutions or organisations as “black” or “white” 30 years after so-called democracy?

All countries are stronger due to the sum of their many parts. Yet in South Africa we are still stigmatised and regulated into racially and culturally isolated “parts” (such as the Black Management Forum), unable to harness the energy of all South Africans to overcome our many challenges.

It is tragic, really.

Ian Ferguson

Via Business Day online

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