Gangster State

new low-cost housing development in Vrede.
The FSHS denied that Zuma and Magashule planned the project, but
admitted that the contract was awarded without a tender process. In its
written response to me, the FSHS said the contract had not needed to
go out on tender because the project formed part of the national
department’s Enhanced People’s Housing Process (EPHP). The EPHP
programme allows for beneficiaries of low-cost housing to determine
who the contractors should be, the FSHS explained. ‘In this case
consultation with [the] beneficiaries was conducted and they chose the
Alternative Building Technology to be used for their houses resulting in
the appointment of said contractors,’ the department told me.
I visited Vrede in November 2018 , and the residents I spoke to
claimed they were not consulted. ‘We just heard the province was
going to build houses for us; we didn’t know how the contractors were
appointed,’ said one Vrede local.
Narsai said the national Department of Human Settlements brought
VNA in for the Vrede project in late 2013 because of its earlier work
with Khaya Readykit. This confirmed what I had already been told,
namely that the project’s origins were in national government and not
at provincial level.
But there was a potential hitch. As we saw in Part III, the national
government in the past took back money for housing projects that the
FSHS had been unable to spend. If this were to happen again, the
Vrede development risked running out of money.
Faced with a housing department that could not spend its budget, the
Magashule administration needed to find new ways to keep its claws in
the province’s housing allocation, maintained my sources. If the FSHS
could transfer its unspent money to third-party entities tasked with