ETHEKWINI Municipality has been criticised for not acting decisively to deal with homelessness in the region.
Chair of the eThekwini Multi-Sectoral Task team, Raymond Perrier, said that while the city was to be commended for commissioning research into the problem and bringing in officials from Cape Town and Johannesburg to share how those areas were dealing with the issue, it had done little else to actively make an impact on the lives of the homeless.
The Task Team, which was convened earlier this year by acting mayor, Fawzia Peer, is made up of municipal officials and includes 13 elected representatives from NGOs, academia, business and the homeless community itself.
In a report to the municipal committee responsible for dealing with the homelessness issue, Perrier, who is the director of the Denis Hurley Centre, thanked Councillor Peer for her personal commitment to the meetings and the co-operation that the Task Team had received from some officials.
However, he expressed concern that the focus by City Hall was on processes and not people which meant that, after many months, not a single one of the Task Team’s ideas was yet to have a concrete impact on the lives of the homeless. Perrier voiced concerns that the city had not provided for the homeless issue in its budget, but was instead relying on NGOs and outside partners to fund initiatives.
“Our role has been to advise eThekwini. We have given the time, resources and insights of our respective organisations, at no charge and at considerable cost to us, to help frame a range of recommendations. We have attended monthly meetings and been involved in extensive discussions inbetween meetings. We have also contributed to public meetings and have tried to mobilise our various support bases to become involved. But it is now clear to us that our ability to make a further positive contribution is limited,” he said.
Perrier said the team had already contributed a range of concrete ideas, many developed from the 2016 HSRC survey of the homeless in Durban. He said many of the ideas were warmly greeted by the municipal members of the Task Team, but almost nothing had yet been implemented. “It is now clear to us that there is little that we can do from outside the Municipality to implement the ideas.”
He said no timeline had been agreed upon by the municipality for any of the steps to be taken to deal with the problem, and this was a cause for concern.
“We hope that all parties will be conscious of the urgency of the situation and act speedily. We are also concerned that eThekwini, unlike other municipalities, has no strategy or even policy in place for tackling homelessness beyond general references in the social policy document,” he said.
DA eThekwini caucus leader, Nicole Graham, echoed similar sentiments saying her party’s proposals to alleviate homelessness in eThekwini were workable, but generally ignored by the ANC. She described the homelessness and drug issue in Durban as a full-blown crisis which needed urgent, detailed and committed responses.
However, Peer, who addressed EXCO members at a recent meeting claimed that significant progress had been made by the City in dealing with the issue. She said that a drug unit and a crime unit had been established within Metro Police, as drugs and homelessness were often intrinsically linked. She added that the municipality would look for a building in which to home the homeless and decide how it should be funded and run.
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Peer said the Safer Cities Unit would take some of the proposals from the Task Team forward to implement. This included using the recently acquired Strollers Building to accommodate homeless women and children. She said a tender would go out soon calling for a non-governmental organisation to run the project.
“Council has also approved a special purpose vehicle to coordinate funding to deal with the issue of homelessness. We are waiting for another building to accommodate the homeless men in the City. So things are progressing but it takes time to implement as processes have to be followed and all these interventions require funding,” she added.
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