Categories: News

From Shack to Celebration: Gugulethu’s First Families Cross the Threshold After 24-Year Wait

After a grueling 24-year wait, twelve families in Gugulethu finally stepped into their brand new homes, a moment of pure joy and relief. These small but mighty houses, built on land once filled with trash, represent a huge victory over endless obstacles like rising costs, theft, and even threats. Each home, though simple, holds the promise of a new, safe life, ending decades of struggle and uncertainty for these deserving families.

What challenges did the Gugulethu housing project face?

The Gugulethu housing project faced numerous challenges, including a 24-year backlog, land contamination, significant cost increases due to inflation, contractor issues, COVID-19 lockdowns, material theft, and extortion attempts by local groups. Logistical hurdles like water pressure, electricity backlogs, and complex sewerage planning also impacted the project.

The Key Ceremony – December 15, a Street Still Wet with Tar

The sun had barely cleared the telegraph wires when kids claimed the still-sticky road for hop-scotch, chalk lines zig-zagging between fresh yellow safety stripes. Four days earlier the last brick was laid; now a City banner whipped overhead: “Breaking New Ground – Home, finally.” Twelve heads of household stepped from a white tent, each handed a laminated envelope: two brass keys, a stamped indemnity form, and a cheat-sheet titled “Moving-in – 48 hours.” Item one: “Turn on the geyser and open every tap for five minutes.” Item two: “Knock on both neighbours’ doors, swap numbers.”

The starter units measure exactly 40 m² – two rooms, open-plan, cavity-brick walls resting on concrete rafts. Galvanised sheeting, charcoal-grey to mute winter glare, tops each box; a 1,2 m stoep provides just enough space for one plastic chair and a Christmas pot plant. Pre-wired conduits wait for a ceiling light and four plug points; the shower stall is fibreglass, deliberately tub-less to shave both water and price. The first thing newcomers notice is the echo, followed by the faint sour whiff of uncured cement. The second thing they test – repeatedly – is the double-cylinder Yale lock, because for decades bedtime meant jamming a spoon into a rattly shack hasp.

City officials reminded everyone that these are “BNG type-2” structures, built to withstand coastal wind and modest quake. No one cared about engineering jargon; cameras clicked as 63-year-old Nomonde Mfazwe pressed her forehead to the doorframe, whispering “Ndikhonya ukuphila okwam,” – I own my life now. She arrived from Dutywa in 1985, raised four children in a backyard single-room, and kept her 2000 subsidy-approval letter ironed flat in plastic, like a fragile promise she refused to let wrinkle.

By the Numbers – A Project 24 Years in the Making

Start with the giant ledger. Metro-wide, 312 000 verified applicants wait for a subsidised house; every month another 1 100 names join. At the current delivery tempo – about 3 500 units a year – the arithmetic stretches to 89 years, assuming no babies and no newcomers. Gugulethu’s own backlog file holds 14 800 names; neighbouring Nyanga adds 9 400. Tuesday’s twelve sounded almost cruelly small, yet to each winner it erased a quarter-century of rent hikes, rain leaks and fire scares.

Zoom in on the triangle of land called Erf 8448, once a rubbish-transfer station. Soil tests showed lead above safe limits, so workers laid geotextile blankets and imported 28 000 m³ of clean fill before a single stand was pegged. Across the canal, the Mau Mau pocket – famous for its 1980s football side and, lately, for land grabs topped with razor wire – will absorb 434 further units. Altogether 1 004 houses are planned; 570 rise on the ex-dump, the rest fill the wedge between 2003 RDP rows and the Premier wheat-spur line.

Price tags tell another story. Unit cost now averages R189 000, a 32 % jump since 2019 driven by cement and steel inflation. Eighteen contractors have rotated on and off site since 2016 – liquidations, performance spats, one dramatic CIDB tender-fraud arrest. Covid-19 lockdowns shuttered work three times, adding 11 months of idle scaffolding and red-ink variation orders. Even so, the city insists the scheme stayed within the revised envelope, propped up by a 7 % contingency raided when extortionists stoned cement trucks on the N2 off-ramp, forcing a three-week time-out and a Philippi detour.

Building in a Phone Booth – Choreography, Crime and Community Skills

Try erecting 40-square-metre shells inside a live township where space is measured in arm-spans. Planners drew 6 m roads – just wide enough for a fire engine, too slim for kerb parking. The only sunny gap became an 1 100 m² playground that doubles as a helicopter pad should the slope-side shacks ignite again. Crews first threw up a 1,2 m palisade and hired 24-hour guards; an empty doorway here becomes a crack den by dusk. Concrete was cast in clusters of twenty so electricians and plumbers could “ghost” through before walls rose, a trick borrowed from Durban’s Cornubia build to outrun tile thieves. Even so, 38 window-frames were prised out last October; replacements cost R420 000, swallowed by the insurance pool.

Then came the quiet parasite: extortion. A group styling itself the “Gugulethu Business Forum” demanded R65 000 “protection” per contractor; refusal bought stoned cement mixers and torched pallets. SAPS tactical units made two arrests, yet the ripple added logistics costs and birthed a WhatsApp channel labelled “Site Intel,” pinging sunrise updates on stone-throwing or suspicious loiterers. Labour rules decree that 60 % of hours go to residents within a 5 km radius – great for transport savings, better for skills. Sinethemba Maboza, 22, began as a hod carrier and is now chasing an NQF-3 bricklaying ticket; he secretly scribbled his surname beneath the plastic sheet of unit C-17, the same plot his aunt will inherit next quarter. “Family quality control,” he grins.

Services arrived via their own trench war. Water pressure on NY108 collapses at dawn, so 5 000 L header tanks crown every second stand, solar-boosted when levels dip below 30 %. Eskom’s transformer backlog left 42 houses glowing with temporary red builder-boxes for an extra month – strange fruit that will vanish once metres arrive. Sewerage was the nastiest puzzle; the 1978 master-plan allowed 45 000 residents, census now counts 92 000. Engineers diverted flow through a 1,2 km, 250 mm pipe into the Athlone collector and specified 4 L low-flush cisterns, a tweak plumbers claim will save 1,3 million litres a year – half an Olympic pool of state-funded water stayed in the dam.

Beyond the Threshold – Paint, Fibre and the Next 992 Dreams

Walls arrive painted once in white PVA, deliberately blank so families can splash their own stories. Ceilings sit 2,7 m high – an extra 30 cm of air that fools the eye into seeing luxury. Outside, a cast-in socket waits for a rotary washing line; beneath the verge lie empty fibre ducts because the broadband team insists even the poor will one day stream. You will not find a garage or perimeter wall – those remain private aspirations, financed via stokvels or the gap market. Allocation night felt part bingo, part revival meeting: beneficiaries drew numbered stones from a canvas sack while cell-phone cameras hunted duplicates; the auditor-general later certified the draw 100 % clean, a minor miracle in a country where queue-jumping is varsity sport.

Title deeds stay locked in municipal custody for 12 months, a cooling-off period meant to thwart instant sales and gentrification flipping. Already a grocer offers a “move-in hamper” on credit – kettle, four plates, 5 kg chicken, two-litre Coke – while DSTV circles with free dish installation, gambling that premium TV beats ceiling insulation in the priority stakes. And the backyard economy is budding: several new owners earn instant landlord status, renting their former zinc shacks to migrants, proof that a housing narrative never ends; it shape-shifts into fresh tenancy chains.

Down the block, Trencor crews are casting slabs for batch 13-24, targeting 68 more roofs by April – weather, sand shortages and holiday burglary stats permitting. Philippi quarry is rationing stone because Mpumalanga rail lines are shut for maintenance; managers joke about importing sand by barge up the Salt River, an absurdity that feels plausible in a city where logistics imagination is the final construction material. Meanwhile community patrollers want a mobile lighting tower for the festive season; the risk-finance unit is calculating premiums versus the optics of a break-in on the evening news.

For now, tinsel glints on unfamiliar walls and the tar still smells of bitumen. Children race through corridors that did not exist last month, while grandparents iron new curtains in anticipation of December guests. The bigger sum remains merciless – 312 000 families, 1 100 new applications every 30 days – yet inside number C-17 Sinethemba’s bricks hold firm, Nomonde’s kettle whistles, and the click of a single Yale lock echoes like a vow: the queue can bend, can shrink, can one day disappear.

[{“question”: “

What was the name of the settlement, and how long did the families have to wait for their new homes?

The settlement is Gugulethu, and the twelve families had to endure a grueling 24-year wait before finally receiving their new homes.