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Zimbabwe defends lack of housing
BBC News
August 30, 2006

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5298572.stm?ls

A Zimbabwe government minister says there is no truth in a report by Church leaders that heavily criticised the state's housing demolitions last year.

Church leaders said in a report that almost nothing had been done to house 700,000 people who lost their homes and livelihoods in the demolitions.

Operation Murambatsvina, which the government said was a drive to clean up cities, was also condemned by the UN.

Minister Didymus Mutasa said the church report was "absolutely not true".

Asked how many new houses had been built, Mr Mutasa replied: "I can't tell you the number immediately, I will have to check. But everyone in the country whether affected by Murambatsvina or not is being considered for decent housing."

He also denied claims made in the report by the church-based Solidarity Peace Trust that most of those people expelled from the cities had since returned.

"People cannot have been living in thin air. They must be living somewhere," he said.

The report claimed that people in the cities had been crowded into those houses that had not been demolished.

"In some houses, people now co-exist in around one square metre per person of floor space," the report states.

Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, chairman of the Solidarity Peace Trust, told the BBC that the government had failed to live up to its promises.

"They themselves said that they would construct 300,000 houses," he said.

"They've constructed a few hundred houses and none of them have been occupied."

The report said that out of more than 100,000 displaced people in the west of the country, not one person has been officially housed by the government.

The informal economy, which was targeted by Operation Murambatsvina, is still in disarray a year after the operation, according to the report.  

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