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Hundreds of homes being built on Lonmin land

Cape Town - The department of human settlements is in the process of building hundreds of houses on land donated by Lonmin [JSE:LON], the owners of the Marikana mine where 34 miners were killed on August 16 2012, the Minister of Human Settlements Lindiwe Sisulu said.

Makashule Gana, a DA MP, asked her in a written parliamentary question when she expected the Marikana Extension 2 Integrated Development Project to be completed and also how many Breaking New Ground (BNG) and Community Residential Units (CRUs) would be built.

In reply Sisulu said that Lonmin had donated 50 hectares of serviced land known as Marikana Extension 2 in October 2013 to her department and to the Rustenburg municipality in the North West province.

The national government had come to the party through its Special Presidential Package on the Revitalisation of Mining Towns and had allocated funding.

Sisulu reported: "Lonmin’s contribution was made at a signing ceremony on 29 October 2013 to the National Department of Human Settlements, North West Department of Human Settlements and Rustenburg Municipality."

In a previous parliamentary question, Sisulu divulged that R155m would be spent on informal settlement upgrading in North West - including R65m in Rustenburg and nearly R70m in Madibeng, both mining towns on the troubled platinum mining belt.

She said the Marikana housing development would take place throughout the medium term expenditure framework period - 2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18. “However, the first phase of 292 BNG units and 252 CRUs is to be completed by August 2015,” she said.

'Preferential selection criteria'

It was envisaged that a total of just short of 2 100 housing units would be built in three years including 535 BNG units at Marikana.

The national housing needs register would be used to determine deserving beneficiaries “because it provides for a fair, transparent and just process of selection of prospective subsidy beneficiaries and allows for regional specific preferential selection criteria”, the minister reported.

The income bracket of the recipients of housing units was up to R3 500 a month.

The minister previously reported that some R290m would be spent on informal settlement upgrading in 2014/15 including R43m on Mpumalanga, R32m on Gauteng and R31m on the Free State. Limpopo would get R17m and the Northern Cape R9m. The bulk of the budget, therefore, is going to North West.

A BNG house is normally a 40 square metre building with two bedrooms, a separate bathroom with toilet, shower and hand basin and a combined living area and kitchen with a wash basin and a ready-board electrical installation where electricity supply is available.

The programme combines different housing densities including single stand units to double-storey units and row houses.

CRUs include hostels and other forms of rental housing. They are either owned by a provincial human settlements’ department or a municipality.

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