The rural village of Eiffel in the Northern Cape is still waiting for houses after a more than R7 million housing construction project started in 2015 and stopped a year later.
The municipality blames the slow progress of the contractor. But the provincial department says the municipality didn’t follow pre-building procedures.
Almost four years ago, about 74 residents in the rural village were optimistic that their mud houses would be a thing of the past.
But that was not to be. 96-year-old Sanah Kopamore, who built her own mud house when she was young, is one of them.
The builders left some foundations and half built houses.
“The houses are incomplete with no roof. it’s painful for us that I even want to find out from the municipality what happened”, says a resident, Kemoneemang Setsijane.
The Joe Morolong Municipality insists the contractor let it down.
“The contractor was not performing as expected. The contractor was failing to meet the deadline and we had to take a decision to terminate the contract,” says Joe Morolong Municipality Municipal Manager, Tebogo Tlhoaele.
The Provincial Department of Human Settlements puts the blame on the municipality. It has since taken over the project to see if construction of houses could proceed.
Meanwhile, it’s not known how much the builder received of the more than seven-million-rand allocated to the project.
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