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Some 14 years ago, Government resettled scores of families on Whitecliff Farm in Harare.
Fourteen years later, those families and many others who moved onto that settlement subsequently, face eviction.
It’s a familiar story. One of being a squatter in one’s own country.
Across the world, billions of people do not own a place that they can call their own.

That it is a situation prevailing the world over does not make it right for the case to be so here in Zimbabwe.
According to some estimates, there is a housing backlog of 1,5 million units in the country.

That effectively means there are 1,5 million families without a roof of their own. Using the average family unit as found in the last national census, there are potentially more than six million people who really do not know if tomorrow they will have shelter.

And this in a country of 13 million people. A country that boasts of diamonds, gold, platinum and countless other resources that have been discovered and continue to be discovered on almost a monthly basis.

It seems that despite our regular words of commendation for slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s social revolution, we never quite learnt the lesson that he had to teach us and all other resource-rich but “poor” countries across the world.

Yes, Gaddafi may or may not have looted oil money, but he sure did his best to ensure that everyone above the age of 18 had a place to call home. By the time he was killed, there was no homelessness to talk of in Libya.

Some might argue that Libya had more money at its disposal and a smaller population (six million) to contend with. But that does not mean we cannot at least do half of what Libya did with its natural resources for its people with our national resources for our people.

A simple fundamental that needs to be appreciated by policy-makers and implementers is that the foundation for any society is food and shelter.

There can be no gross national product to talk of if people are hungry or feel insecure because they don’t know from one day to the next if they will have somewhere safe and dignified to lay their heads or they will be staring at the stars at night.

A report by Bard Real Estate pegs the average prices for serviced high, medium and low-density land in Harare at US$25, US$18 and US$15, respectively, per square metre. The averages for Bulawayo are US$12, US$10 and US$6 respectively.

Further, complete housing units in the two cities are pegged at no less than US$12 000.
Banks and other institutions have tried to come up with housing financing but these can only go so far. After all, these are firms that are in business and want to return a profit.

So inasmuch as they may want to contribute to alleviating the housing situation, they still have to consider their obligations to shareholders, investors and employees.

This means that ultimately it is up to Government to guarantee a fair shot at living in decent lodgings.
As Pardon Gotora noted in an article published by The Herald, in colonial times it was the duty of Government to facilitate housing for people.

Of course, because of the Land Tenure Act, blacks couldn’t own immovable properties and could only be rent-paying tenants.
The idea was that blacks would return to dry, inhospitable rural areas when they stopped working for whites in urban areas or at mines. Not much has changed, except that it’s not privileged whites who the black majority are working for today.

The private sector cannot be expected to provide social housing. That is the responsibility of Government.
It is one thing to be legalistic and evict “squatters”, but it is quite another to be responsible and to come up with schemes that ensure more people have decent accommodation.