The Congress of South African Trade Unions in the Northern Cape is fully behind the call by the Minister of Human Settlements, Comrade Tokyo Sexwale, for the demolition of the poorly built RDP houses, so that they can be rebuilt with the desired quality.

It is indeed a shame and an insult to our people to allow them to stay in brick shacks under the guise of service delivery.  However we want to take the call further and call for a forensic investigation of all the shoddy projects in the province so that the culprits, both in construction and in government, are brought to book.

Our call is consistent with our resolve to fight corruption with everything we have.  In fighting corruption that does not mean we should start with this government and leave the tendencies that manifested themselves in the past fifteen years, no ways. Corruption is corruption even if it happened many years ago; it can't be left unattended.

It is therefore our view that in these tender processes, for every corrupt government official there is a corrupt businessman and vice versa.  Hence it is important that if our government wants to root out corruption, both the corruptors and the corrupted must be harshly dealt with.

It is saddening to note that our people are still living in conditions of squalor even though claims are made that their lives have been improved through the provision of shelter.  We do not just want shelter.  We need decent houses for our people. Such badly built houses must be removed from the statistics of service delivery as they do not qualify to be there. In fact we need to have statistics of the low quality houses that they built for our people before they ran away to form COPE.

We are aware that the quality of the houses is influenced by the levels of looting between the corrupt officials and the corrupt business people.  The poor the quality the more looting is bound to have taken place.  This is what we mean by the diversion of resources into greedy individuals' pockets.

This tendency of paying constructors in full before their projects are completed and thoroughly inspected must come to an end.  These are the tendencies that lead to nation-wide service delivery protests.  People are not protesting against their legitimate government, but rather they are protesting against corruption and corrupt elements within our public service.

No one should take the comments of the honourable member of COPE serious because it was during his term of office that houses in Soul City were build with bricks that are below standard.  The honourable member of COPE was the MEC for local government and housing when those houses and many others in the province were built.  It was his department during his term in office that started with the contravention of the housing code by undermining the fundamental principles of "quality and affordability".

When we made noise and raised concerns about the poor workmanship at that point, he was the one who jumped to the defence of those projects.  We cannot allow people like this to want to score cheap, selfish political gains with the mess they created and ran away.  Our people are intelligent enough, they might be poor but they will never be misled by hypocrisy.

He is one of the people that ran away from the ANC because of the stance it took in Polokwane against corruption, cronyism and patronage and today he wants to play a moral game.

We are convinced now, more than ever, that the ANC remains the only vehicle for the liberation of our people from poverty, unemployment and conditions of squalor.

But off course the ANC will be able to do all this within the confines of a reconfigured alliance.

Our call goes to the department of human settlements and traditional affairs in the province to speed up the implementation of the Minister's instruction to fix the damages that were caused by government to our people from as far back as when people like the honourable member of COPE and others were in government.

Statement issued by Anele Gxoyiya, COSATU Northern Cape Provincial Secretary, November 4 2009

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