The Mossel Bay Municipality and its Implementing Agent, Zutari attended a community meeting with a group of about eighty (80) disgruntled members of the Emfuleni community in the KwanonQaba Community Hall on Tuesday evening 21 September 2021.

The community members have concerns regarding the recent household survey and verification process that was undertaken by the Zutari Communication and Stakeholder Engagement team as part of the work required to prepare for the implementation of the Phase 1 of the Mossel Bay Municipality UISP project.

The Mossel Bay Municipality in collaboration with relevant stakeholders and the Beneficiary Liaison Committee’s (BLC’s) developed a guideline policy to guide the way households and beneficiaries of the Mossel Bay UISP are enumerated. The policy is inline with the Department of Human Settlement’s National Housing Code for the Upgrading of Informal Settlements.  The purpose of the guideline is to provide a framework for the uniform way of counting the all the households in the Informal Settlements within the jurisdiction of Mossel Bay Municipality.  The aim is to provide for fair and transparent guidelines around the enumeration of households in the Informal Settlements. The guideline outlines how the Mossel Bay Municipality provide, regulate, and enable the counting of households in the Informal Settlements to realise the provision of “one housing opportunity per household in the Informal Settlements”.

The National Housing Code states that the UISP Programme will “benefit households and individuals residing in informal settlements”.  Some members of the community feel that this is not fair and that they should be counted as beneficiaries even if they are residing somewhere else, because they were counted previously in the 2017 household survey.

Some members of the community also feel that the current BLC members abused their power when trying to assist the survey team in implementing the policy.

The Mossel Bay Municipality and its Implementing Agent undertook to arrange a series of workshops to again explain the principles of the UISP to try and bridge the gap on the current misconceptions that exist within the community of the Emfuleni informal settlement.