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Research needs and priorities in housing and construction in Mozambique
0197-3975185 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd.
HABITATINTL. Vol. 9,No.2,pp.65-12,1985 Printed in Great Britain.
Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique* JO& FORJAZ Secretary of State for Physical Planning, National Institute for Physical Planning, Avenue Acordos de Lusaka 2115, Maputo, Mozambique
We are here to discuss the problem of housing in our countries - what it is and how to solve it. Research is but a tool to help us to solve that problem. Each person has a different view of what the housing problem is - each person has a different set of solutions, or an answer, or a policy, or, maybe, just an idea. To explain why I have no solution it is necessary to define what I do consider to be the housing problem in Mozambique. After having explained why I have no solution, I will, then, be asking for help - any help will do -best of all material help, but even some good ideas could help. Mozambique is a big country, with distances between cities of well over 2,000 km, with distances to the sea of more than 900 km, with 800,000 sq. km of land and lakes, 2,500 km of coast along the Indian Ocean (with monsoons and typhoons), with great rivers and savannahs full of some of the most beautiful animals and plants that man can still see in the dignity of liberty. We are the land of baobab. We have mountains also - where people sometimes may die of cold, even if it is more natural to die of heat in our country. From 12 to 26 degrees of latitude south we live, about 13% million of us, crossed by the Tropic of Capricorn, in between the Stone Age and the gold of South Africa. How do we determine how we live, where we live and in what houses we live? Most of us are peasants, with our wives and children also in the fields. Some not many - are factory workers and have to buy food. A few are civil servants, students, technicians, intellectuals. Very few and they, also, have to pay for their food, and for their house. Wherever it may be. One first lesson we learned: that the housing problem is not a technical one. It is a problem of statistics. What are, then our statistics? How many of us need houses? What is a house? A house for President Samora Machel is not the same thing as a house for a railway worker, or a university professor, or a carpenter (in 1984 . . .); and this is not as evident as it seems, especially if you mix them all up in the same statistics as - for instance - urban dwellers. *This is an edited Priorities for Housing 1984.
version of a paper prepared for the International and Construction Activities in Developing Countries,
65
Seminar on Research Needs and Lund, Sweden, 17-21 September,
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JosC Forjaz
To complicate matters even more it is important to understand that a house for a peasant of the Gaza Province is not the same thing as a house for a peasant in northern Niassa - who does not even know exactly where Johannesburg is, and, probably, has never seen a railway . . . So there are houses and houses. There are houses with water and electricity and glass windows and toilets and people live well inside them. There are houses without water or electricity or toilets, and people live well inside them. And viceversa. And there is a strange and new phenomenon - from parents to children there is a cultural leap that makes living in the same house a great sacrifice for both generations. The great difference, for us with the responsibility to take decisions in this field of housing is however, not so complicated: the great difference is between the ones that can build their own house and the ones that cannot. For the ones that cannot, somebody has to build and, in the vast majority of cases, to pay for the construction. In Mozambique we prohibited speculation in the building sector. Nobody can rent or let a house or any building or any part of any building. Only the state. We also nationalised the land. (It was the minimum a revolution could do . . .) Having finished speculation we finished speculators . . . and most of the builders in the process. In other words - the state has to build, administer, repair, maintain and distribute the houses for the people. Because we also have to feed, educate, take care of, administer, fight a war, represent our people in other countries, things became very difficult indeed. What is then the size of the housing problem? How difficult have things become? I will give you the most significant numbers. In 1980 we had in the country a total of about 2,700,OOO families of which about 350,000 can be considered urban (urban being the families living in the 12 major cities). Of the total number of families in the country, only 8.3% lived in what we can call permanent houses. By that we mean houses built with brick or cement blocks. The other 91.7% live in houses made of: timber and corrugated iron 2.3% adobe 9% bamboo or wooden poles 14.1% wooden poles and mud 63.4% 2.9% other If we analyse now the house as a function of its geographical position, we will see that: in towns, 38% are brick or cement block houses; in the rural areas, 4% are brick or cement block houses. Looking at the situation in towns, we found that of the total of 350,000 houses only about 130,000 were “permanent houses”. The other 220,000 houses need constant repairs and rebuilding as they are built in precarious materials. This figure is growing very fast because we have been unable to provide any additional permanent housing for our urban population which is growing at the rate of 8-10% per annum. This means that now, in 1984, we need to improve the housing conditions of well over 300,000 houses in urban areas alone, and to build some 30,000 new houses, annually, even if we leave aside the needs of the rural areas. These houses occupy an area of well over 1,500 hectares which must be reorganised spatially, infrastructured, equipped and serviced. Before we go any further, it is important to know what kind of services we are providing to our people. Taking water supply as the first priority the situation is as follows: of the 2,700,OOO families only 4% have piped water inside the house, 8.7% have piped water outside the house and 87.2% must fetch their water from rivers, lakes, ponds, wells or cisterns. The situation is even more unbalanced if we compare towns and rural areas:
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68.6% of the urban population has piped water supply inside or outside the house against 4.2% of the rural population serviced. The situation in terms of basic sanitation is also not brilliant, but improved spectacularly since Independence in 1975. In fact, the figure in 1970 was of the order of 60,000 latrines for the whole country and in 1980 of the order of 1,200,OOO- i.e. a multiplication by a factor of 20, which demonstrates the success of the national campaign, launched soon after Independence. The distribution is as follows: 41% of the total number of families have a latrine; 72% of the families in urban centres have a latrine; 43% of the families in rural areas have a latrine. In terms of electricity supply the situation is more difficult: 4% only of the total number of families have houses with electricity, meaning: 23.2% of urban families and 1.3% of rural families. This figure - very low indeed - is even more dramatic when it is known that 61% of the total number of families with electricity at home live in the three major cities - Maputo, Beira and Nampula. One last index given by our national census of 1980 refers to the possession of radios. This is the best indication of our capacity to inform and communicate because, given our high ratio of illiteracy and the very limited circulation of the newspapers, only the spoken word can reach the people rapidly and effectively. The figures are as follows for the percentage of families with radio receivers: 16.7% of all families have radio receivers; including 48% of urban families and 11.9% of rural families. Here again there is a strong urban bias, as we know that in the capital, Maputo, 61% of the families possess a radio set. The census did not provide other indices of public services such as availability of transportation, access to schools, average distance to commercial facilities, recreation, postal services, etc. The fact that such indices were not included is in itself an indication of the very low importance that such services still have in our country. The figures mentioned are the real problem - they give us its size and its nature. The first political decision on housing policy was taken in 1977 by the 3rd Congress of FRELIMO and included in the Economic and Social Directives. The following basic principles were clearly defined in the chapter on Human Settlements and Housing. The state cannot take responsibility for the housing needs of the citizens living in isolation or away from organised human communities. The housing problem cannot be reduced to the problem of the building of the dwellings. Without a minimum of infrastructure and planning, without some services and administration and without political organisation, there is no organised human community. Given the extremely limited human, financial and technical means that can be allocated for the construction of houses, the bulk of the responsibility for the improvement of housing conditions falls back on the people themselves. The state must, then, dedicate its energy and capacity: in coordination with the different economic and social sectors, to define the strategy for the planning of human settlements, its distribution in the territory and the priorities for its development; to elaborate urban plans and control their implementation and systematic revision, assuring the correct land use, the maximum and better use for the existing infrastructure and the protection of the environment; to execute projects and help the population in the building of the
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infrastructure and social equipment for human settlements, giving special priority to water supply and drainage; to organ&e and give technical support to self-help and cooperative organisations for house-building; to help the development of credit and savings mechanisms for housebuilding; to define the responsibility of the enterprises with regard to housing for the workers; to pass legislation to regulate the construction and ownership of houses and the transmission of ownership; to study standards for house-building elements and develop new types of low-cost furniture; to study traditional technology and house forms, in order to develop more adequate and cheaper houses; to help the people to take care of and maintain the nationalised housing stock; to train and teach technicians for the activities of regional, urban and rural planning and for the housing sector. Finally, the Directives determined the creation of a specific government structure to implement the directives. This was done in the same year (1977) as the creation of the National Housing Directorate, which became in 1983 the Secretariat of State for Physical Planning incorporating all the above tasks with environment, geography and cadastre as new responsibilities. In other words, we think that we know what the problem is, and who must define the policy and define the strategy to solve it. What we find more difficult is to know what to do to solve it, given our difficulties. What are our difficulties? Let us suppose we are one of the families wanting to build a house in one of our cities, what are the difficulties that the family faces? Let us mention the most common and most important. Land and services Town executive councils are not allocating sufficient lots for everybody and, in most cases, the lots distributed are too far from the centre, or from the employment areas. The lots are also too small for cultivation, so the family’s food supply has to be supplemented by cultivating land even further from the centre and far from the houses. The authorities say that the lots cannot be bigger because it makes water supply and electricity and roads too expensive (but in any case those things do not materialise even for the small lots . . .). Water is normally the biggest problem. The new areas where lots are being distributed do not, normally, have piped water. They also, usually, have no electricity, no school, no hospital, or police, no telephone, no shops, no football fields, no public administration, no cinemas, etc. Finally, to obtain a piece of land for the legalised use of the family, a number of documents have to be produced and, for certain areas, even a project is demanded (and there are no architects or engineers or drawing materials . . .). Materials There are no building materials for sale - no cement, nails, roof sheets, timber, steel, wire, paint, glass, sanitary fittings, electrical fittings or plumbing. Sometimes, irregularly, one can get a few bricks, or sand-cement blocks. In lower standard neighbourhoods it is generally possible to buy wooden poles and reeds (can&o) at exhorbitant prices. There is also a great shortage of tools.
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Labour
Work is expensive, specially skilled and semi-skilled (if paid in local currency . . .). Labour is not, however, the great problem. The high costs of labour are much more due to low productivity, because most of the time the workers are waiting for the materials or transport, or lack organisation, or have no foreman. Transport
It is very difficult and very expensive to find a truck to fetch materials and labour. A new form of transport has appeared -the xova-xitaduma or push cart - that can carry up to 500 kg and is helping, but does not solve the problem altogether. Money and credit
The bank does not lend money for house-building, after the first sad experiences when people returned the money, as they were paying interest for capital that could not be invested due to the shortages of materials, transport, etc. Of all the factors that make building a house a very difficult enterprise for a Mozambican family, the shortage and the difficulty of getting building materials is the most important and the most difficult to overcome. What can the government do to solve these problems? What has been done? Having nationalised the land and prohibited real estate speculation, the Mozambique Revolution laid the fundamental bases for any effective and healthy housing policy. However, land cannot be distributed without planning. The few urban plans inherited, did not satisfy new ideals. New plans had to be drawn. Plans are but just a part of the process. Plans have to be accepted, applied and controlled. None of the twelve major towns, including the capital, was left with a working urban planning office. The National Directorate of Housing was created only by mid-1977, and, besides having to structure itself, it had to recruit technicians, gather information, develop a basic guidelines policy, finish a number of projects lingering from colonial times, etc. In the meantime, the administrative and political structure of the towns had to be created. The colonial administration could not give answers to the new conditions. Planning without recognised authority was a matter of solving some of the more dramatic situations, not the development of a coherent and effective activity. It was only after the Law of Lands and the first National Meeting of Cities and Communal Neighbourhoods, that we could start to work seriously on urban planning, with the assurance of a national policy basis. This was only possible by mid-1979. The fact that we now have a well-defined position on municipal administration does not mean, however, that we can administer our towns. Most of the towns are not able to create their own planning offices, and there is only one, Maputo, where the planning office has a minimum technical staff. All the others, including Beira with more than 300,000 people, have not one single architect, engineer, or urban planner on their staff! This dramatic situation was felt immediately after Independence, as the last of the architects and engineers abandoned the country. Having recognised the uselessness of any effort to plan if there is no trained staff to carry out the plans and control them, the National Directorate of Housing, which was also very deeply involved in rural development and planning, decided that it was essential to start training Mozambicans for different planning activities.
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In 1979, after a very short training period, the first group of “barefoot planners” started their activity in all provinces, and planning offices were established which could provide a minimum of support to the planning of rural communities and of the cities. Today, the training programme continues, and the first trained batch (who are now at middle level) acquired great experience in the field and took responsibility for our 10 provincial offices. The urban land problem cannot be solved just by dividing it into lots. Infrastructure and services are essential to transform nature into cities. Resources to invest in the planning and execution of infrastructure are, however, non-existent. Towns of 60430,000 people do not have a single truck to cart away the rubbish, or to maintain the street system. Municipal work gangs have no foreman to direct or control them. Water-supply systems are run by barely literate workers, who have no idea of the reasons for the necessity of the technical processes they control. Only two cities in the country have a public transportation system. Municipal budgets are established at central level and the funds are little more than what is needed just to pay the staff. There is not one grader or bulldozer or cylinder distributed to one single town. The idea is to equip local public works departments, and to contract the jobs needed to building firms. The problem is that the building firms suffer from the same sickness - lack of technicians, administrators, foremen, skilled personnel, transport and equipment, building materials; and the priorities are that the reduced existing capacity is to be allocated to development projects. Urban development was never considered a first priority. The problems of materials, and working capacity, are equally difficult to solve. The country does not produce enough basic materials and very few, and insufficient, finishing materials of conventional quality. By that we mean: construction timber; cement and lime; steel in any form - bars, sheet or piping; building brick, tiles and clay pipes; sanitary ware; paints and varnishes; ironmongery; glass; nails, screws, bolts, wire and netting. Tools and equipment are also virtually 100~ imported. Traditional building materials include: bamboo and c&go (reeds and thin bamboo); thatch; wooden poles and sticks; adobe; woven palm leaves; stone (not cut). These are virtually non-existent inside the towns, and every year they are available further and further away from the perimeter of towns. In Maputo, for instance, the traditional cani~o (thin bamboo), so popular and practical, has to come now from at least 70 km away and often from up to 100 km or more. It is also important to point that we do not have industrial cities - not even Maputo with nearly one million people. So we do not have industrial refuse as a source of cheap building materials. Given the high maintenance that traditional building requires, it is now in general cheaper to build in cement block or brick than in bamboo and thatch the problem is, again, not an economic one, it is a problem of availability of materials. The country has theoretically the capacity to produce 800,000 tons of cement per year. For reasons - that range from the War to the lack of dollars to buy spare parts, transportation, technology and raw materials - we are producing only about 200,000 tons, of which we must export some to obtain foreign currency. Given the policy of reserving basic materials for development and infrastructure projects, what remains for sale to the public is very little indeed. The same applies to the other materials produced locally. The same applies to the few imported materials and tools. Well then. If we have no urbanised land, no materials or tools, no transportation, no technical expertise or skilled labour: why should we have credit schemes?
Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique
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or self-help schemes? or cooperative schemes? or sites-and-services schemes? But we need houses. In Maputo alone, the National Buildings Administration received in 1983 some 1,567 requests for houses, in addition to the 27,802 demands registered from previous years. The administration was able to supply 1,020 houses for rental throughout 1983, i.e. less than 3.3% of the needs. Our difficulties however do not stop there. We have to think about maintenance and repairs of the existing stock. The situation is not easy to measure. We know that we do not have the organisation or the capacity to satisfy the demands; and we also know that, given the cultural profile of the population, a great part of the housing stock is in such a state that users fear to ask for repairs or maintenance, because they could be expelled for damage to state property. Our feeling is that degradation is deep and extended. We fear that we are losing more houses than the gaining from those we are building. In other words the gap between the demand and the supply of houses is widening fast and dangerously. The situation in our country is, perhaps, one of the more desperate, even if the reasons for it are to be found in the tragic evolution of the economic situation of the Third World countries and, very specially, the Southern African countries. But it is not very different from the situation in most Third World countries. What can research do to help us to get more homes for our people? What can we research about? - about the social aspects of housing? - about the technical aspects of low-cost building? - about the economics of urban development and residential investment? - about the administrative efficiency of municipal management? - about the quality and nature of training for the housing sector? - about what kind of house can fulfil the needs and limitations of a society in transition from rural to urban, from tribal to socialist? - about standards? - about statistics? - about what to research? In Mozambique, we have done some research in some of those directions and we have studied what has been done by other countries. We have carried out: anthropological studies; social analysis; technical research; economic studies; and inter-disciplinary research. We have hired people to do it for us and with us. We still have some people researching. But we have less and less houses for more urban people. We never believed that research would be the miracle that would solve our problems - but we believed that it could help. The truth is: it has not helped - as I have just proved. More and more we believe that what we need is people to help us to apply the marvellous fruits of other peoples’ research. What we need are urban planners who know how to make the most economic street layout and how to plan a city of a million people that has to live off agriculture and still be the capital of the country. What we need are architects who can help us to save materials for the construction of houses and who can design the simplest and cheapest schools, and markets, and health centres, and shops. What we need are builders who can teach us how to mix the right sort of clay and the right sort of sand to make the right sort of adobe, and to lay it the right way to make plumb walls and round vaults. What we need are people with experience to help us to run our brick factories and our cement factories. What we need are people with experience to help us to teach our people without experience. What we need is money to buy materials, and equipment and skills. Do we need more research? A researcher costs us $50,000 per annum. With
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that money, I can import the building materials needed to build 25 houses of 40 sq. m - good shelter for more than 100 Mozambicans. With that money I can buy roof sheets sufficient to cover more than 200 houses and shelter more than 1,000 Mozambicans. 1 do not want to sound negative or use demagogic processes. I know that money available for research will not be available for building material (or could it be . . .?). But I must be frank and open, and state to you that a great many research operations seem to us a disguised form of postponing the problems, a soft form of making the funds allocated to assistance return to the donor countries, an academic self-satisfying experience, a technocratic approach to socio-economic problems, a cultural paternalistic trip, an end in itself, a useless loss of time and money. But there certainly are other forms of research that have contributed and will help to solve our problem. It is in the hope that, in this Seminar, we would find positive answers and take with us ideas and guidelines, that we came to Sweden and that we agreed to participate. We came to learn and get help.
HABITATINTL. Vol. 9,No.2,pp.65-12,1985 Printed in Great Britain.
Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique* JO& FORJAZ Secretary of State for Physical Planning, National Institute for Physical Planning, Avenue Acordos de Lusaka 2115, Maputo, Mozambique
We are here to discuss the problem of housing in our countries - what it is and how to solve it. Research is but a tool to help us to solve that problem. Each person has a different view of what the housing problem is - each person has a different set of solutions, or an answer, or a policy, or, maybe, just an idea. To explain why I have no solution it is necessary to define what I do consider to be the housing problem in Mozambique. After having explained why I have no solution, I will, then, be asking for help - any help will do -best of all material help, but even some good ideas could help. Mozambique is a big country, with distances between cities of well over 2,000 km, with distances to the sea of more than 900 km, with 800,000 sq. km of land and lakes, 2,500 km of coast along the Indian Ocean (with monsoons and typhoons), with great rivers and savannahs full of some of the most beautiful animals and plants that man can still see in the dignity of liberty. We are the land of baobab. We have mountains also - where people sometimes may die of cold, even if it is more natural to die of heat in our country. From 12 to 26 degrees of latitude south we live, about 13% million of us, crossed by the Tropic of Capricorn, in between the Stone Age and the gold of South Africa. How do we determine how we live, where we live and in what houses we live? Most of us are peasants, with our wives and children also in the fields. Some not many - are factory workers and have to buy food. A few are civil servants, students, technicians, intellectuals. Very few and they, also, have to pay for their food, and for their house. Wherever it may be. One first lesson we learned: that the housing problem is not a technical one. It is a problem of statistics. What are, then our statistics? How many of us need houses? What is a house? A house for President Samora Machel is not the same thing as a house for a railway worker, or a university professor, or a carpenter (in 1984 . . .); and this is not as evident as it seems, especially if you mix them all up in the same statistics as - for instance - urban dwellers. *This is an edited Priorities for Housing 1984.
version of a paper prepared for the International and Construction Activities in Developing Countries,
65
Seminar on Research Needs and Lund, Sweden, 17-21 September,
66
JosC Forjaz
To complicate matters even more it is important to understand that a house for a peasant of the Gaza Province is not the same thing as a house for a peasant in northern Niassa - who does not even know exactly where Johannesburg is, and, probably, has never seen a railway . . . So there are houses and houses. There are houses with water and electricity and glass windows and toilets and people live well inside them. There are houses without water or electricity or toilets, and people live well inside them. And viceversa. And there is a strange and new phenomenon - from parents to children there is a cultural leap that makes living in the same house a great sacrifice for both generations. The great difference, for us with the responsibility to take decisions in this field of housing is however, not so complicated: the great difference is between the ones that can build their own house and the ones that cannot. For the ones that cannot, somebody has to build and, in the vast majority of cases, to pay for the construction. In Mozambique we prohibited speculation in the building sector. Nobody can rent or let a house or any building or any part of any building. Only the state. We also nationalised the land. (It was the minimum a revolution could do . . .) Having finished speculation we finished speculators . . . and most of the builders in the process. In other words - the state has to build, administer, repair, maintain and distribute the houses for the people. Because we also have to feed, educate, take care of, administer, fight a war, represent our people in other countries, things became very difficult indeed. What is then the size of the housing problem? How difficult have things become? I will give you the most significant numbers. In 1980 we had in the country a total of about 2,700,OOO families of which about 350,000 can be considered urban (urban being the families living in the 12 major cities). Of the total number of families in the country, only 8.3% lived in what we can call permanent houses. By that we mean houses built with brick or cement blocks. The other 91.7% live in houses made of: timber and corrugated iron 2.3% adobe 9% bamboo or wooden poles 14.1% wooden poles and mud 63.4% 2.9% other If we analyse now the house as a function of its geographical position, we will see that: in towns, 38% are brick or cement block houses; in the rural areas, 4% are brick or cement block houses. Looking at the situation in towns, we found that of the total of 350,000 houses only about 130,000 were “permanent houses”. The other 220,000 houses need constant repairs and rebuilding as they are built in precarious materials. This figure is growing very fast because we have been unable to provide any additional permanent housing for our urban population which is growing at the rate of 8-10% per annum. This means that now, in 1984, we need to improve the housing conditions of well over 300,000 houses in urban areas alone, and to build some 30,000 new houses, annually, even if we leave aside the needs of the rural areas. These houses occupy an area of well over 1,500 hectares which must be reorganised spatially, infrastructured, equipped and serviced. Before we go any further, it is important to know what kind of services we are providing to our people. Taking water supply as the first priority the situation is as follows: of the 2,700,OOO families only 4% have piped water inside the house, 8.7% have piped water outside the house and 87.2% must fetch their water from rivers, lakes, ponds, wells or cisterns. The situation is even more unbalanced if we compare towns and rural areas:
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68.6% of the urban population has piped water supply inside or outside the house against 4.2% of the rural population serviced. The situation in terms of basic sanitation is also not brilliant, but improved spectacularly since Independence in 1975. In fact, the figure in 1970 was of the order of 60,000 latrines for the whole country and in 1980 of the order of 1,200,OOO- i.e. a multiplication by a factor of 20, which demonstrates the success of the national campaign, launched soon after Independence. The distribution is as follows: 41% of the total number of families have a latrine; 72% of the families in urban centres have a latrine; 43% of the families in rural areas have a latrine. In terms of electricity supply the situation is more difficult: 4% only of the total number of families have houses with electricity, meaning: 23.2% of urban families and 1.3% of rural families. This figure - very low indeed - is even more dramatic when it is known that 61% of the total number of families with electricity at home live in the three major cities - Maputo, Beira and Nampula. One last index given by our national census of 1980 refers to the possession of radios. This is the best indication of our capacity to inform and communicate because, given our high ratio of illiteracy and the very limited circulation of the newspapers, only the spoken word can reach the people rapidly and effectively. The figures are as follows for the percentage of families with radio receivers: 16.7% of all families have radio receivers; including 48% of urban families and 11.9% of rural families. Here again there is a strong urban bias, as we know that in the capital, Maputo, 61% of the families possess a radio set. The census did not provide other indices of public services such as availability of transportation, access to schools, average distance to commercial facilities, recreation, postal services, etc. The fact that such indices were not included is in itself an indication of the very low importance that such services still have in our country. The figures mentioned are the real problem - they give us its size and its nature. The first political decision on housing policy was taken in 1977 by the 3rd Congress of FRELIMO and included in the Economic and Social Directives. The following basic principles were clearly defined in the chapter on Human Settlements and Housing. The state cannot take responsibility for the housing needs of the citizens living in isolation or away from organised human communities. The housing problem cannot be reduced to the problem of the building of the dwellings. Without a minimum of infrastructure and planning, without some services and administration and without political organisation, there is no organised human community. Given the extremely limited human, financial and technical means that can be allocated for the construction of houses, the bulk of the responsibility for the improvement of housing conditions falls back on the people themselves. The state must, then, dedicate its energy and capacity: in coordination with the different economic and social sectors, to define the strategy for the planning of human settlements, its distribution in the territory and the priorities for its development; to elaborate urban plans and control their implementation and systematic revision, assuring the correct land use, the maximum and better use for the existing infrastructure and the protection of the environment; to execute projects and help the population in the building of the
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infrastructure and social equipment for human settlements, giving special priority to water supply and drainage; to organ&e and give technical support to self-help and cooperative organisations for house-building; to help the development of credit and savings mechanisms for housebuilding; to define the responsibility of the enterprises with regard to housing for the workers; to pass legislation to regulate the construction and ownership of houses and the transmission of ownership; to study standards for house-building elements and develop new types of low-cost furniture; to study traditional technology and house forms, in order to develop more adequate and cheaper houses; to help the people to take care of and maintain the nationalised housing stock; to train and teach technicians for the activities of regional, urban and rural planning and for the housing sector. Finally, the Directives determined the creation of a specific government structure to implement the directives. This was done in the same year (1977) as the creation of the National Housing Directorate, which became in 1983 the Secretariat of State for Physical Planning incorporating all the above tasks with environment, geography and cadastre as new responsibilities. In other words, we think that we know what the problem is, and who must define the policy and define the strategy to solve it. What we find more difficult is to know what to do to solve it, given our difficulties. What are our difficulties? Let us suppose we are one of the families wanting to build a house in one of our cities, what are the difficulties that the family faces? Let us mention the most common and most important. Land and services Town executive councils are not allocating sufficient lots for everybody and, in most cases, the lots distributed are too far from the centre, or from the employment areas. The lots are also too small for cultivation, so the family’s food supply has to be supplemented by cultivating land even further from the centre and far from the houses. The authorities say that the lots cannot be bigger because it makes water supply and electricity and roads too expensive (but in any case those things do not materialise even for the small lots . . .). Water is normally the biggest problem. The new areas where lots are being distributed do not, normally, have piped water. They also, usually, have no electricity, no school, no hospital, or police, no telephone, no shops, no football fields, no public administration, no cinemas, etc. Finally, to obtain a piece of land for the legalised use of the family, a number of documents have to be produced and, for certain areas, even a project is demanded (and there are no architects or engineers or drawing materials . . .). Materials There are no building materials for sale - no cement, nails, roof sheets, timber, steel, wire, paint, glass, sanitary fittings, electrical fittings or plumbing. Sometimes, irregularly, one can get a few bricks, or sand-cement blocks. In lower standard neighbourhoods it is generally possible to buy wooden poles and reeds (can&o) at exhorbitant prices. There is also a great shortage of tools.
Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique
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Labour
Work is expensive, specially skilled and semi-skilled (if paid in local currency . . .). Labour is not, however, the great problem. The high costs of labour are much more due to low productivity, because most of the time the workers are waiting for the materials or transport, or lack organisation, or have no foreman. Transport
It is very difficult and very expensive to find a truck to fetch materials and labour. A new form of transport has appeared -the xova-xitaduma or push cart - that can carry up to 500 kg and is helping, but does not solve the problem altogether. Money and credit
The bank does not lend money for house-building, after the first sad experiences when people returned the money, as they were paying interest for capital that could not be invested due to the shortages of materials, transport, etc. Of all the factors that make building a house a very difficult enterprise for a Mozambican family, the shortage and the difficulty of getting building materials is the most important and the most difficult to overcome. What can the government do to solve these problems? What has been done? Having nationalised the land and prohibited real estate speculation, the Mozambique Revolution laid the fundamental bases for any effective and healthy housing policy. However, land cannot be distributed without planning. The few urban plans inherited, did not satisfy new ideals. New plans had to be drawn. Plans are but just a part of the process. Plans have to be accepted, applied and controlled. None of the twelve major towns, including the capital, was left with a working urban planning office. The National Directorate of Housing was created only by mid-1977, and, besides having to structure itself, it had to recruit technicians, gather information, develop a basic guidelines policy, finish a number of projects lingering from colonial times, etc. In the meantime, the administrative and political structure of the towns had to be created. The colonial administration could not give answers to the new conditions. Planning without recognised authority was a matter of solving some of the more dramatic situations, not the development of a coherent and effective activity. It was only after the Law of Lands and the first National Meeting of Cities and Communal Neighbourhoods, that we could start to work seriously on urban planning, with the assurance of a national policy basis. This was only possible by mid-1979. The fact that we now have a well-defined position on municipal administration does not mean, however, that we can administer our towns. Most of the towns are not able to create their own planning offices, and there is only one, Maputo, where the planning office has a minimum technical staff. All the others, including Beira with more than 300,000 people, have not one single architect, engineer, or urban planner on their staff! This dramatic situation was felt immediately after Independence, as the last of the architects and engineers abandoned the country. Having recognised the uselessness of any effort to plan if there is no trained staff to carry out the plans and control them, the National Directorate of Housing, which was also very deeply involved in rural development and planning, decided that it was essential to start training Mozambicans for different planning activities.
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In 1979, after a very short training period, the first group of “barefoot planners” started their activity in all provinces, and planning offices were established which could provide a minimum of support to the planning of rural communities and of the cities. Today, the training programme continues, and the first trained batch (who are now at middle level) acquired great experience in the field and took responsibility for our 10 provincial offices. The urban land problem cannot be solved just by dividing it into lots. Infrastructure and services are essential to transform nature into cities. Resources to invest in the planning and execution of infrastructure are, however, non-existent. Towns of 60430,000 people do not have a single truck to cart away the rubbish, or to maintain the street system. Municipal work gangs have no foreman to direct or control them. Water-supply systems are run by barely literate workers, who have no idea of the reasons for the necessity of the technical processes they control. Only two cities in the country have a public transportation system. Municipal budgets are established at central level and the funds are little more than what is needed just to pay the staff. There is not one grader or bulldozer or cylinder distributed to one single town. The idea is to equip local public works departments, and to contract the jobs needed to building firms. The problem is that the building firms suffer from the same sickness - lack of technicians, administrators, foremen, skilled personnel, transport and equipment, building materials; and the priorities are that the reduced existing capacity is to be allocated to development projects. Urban development was never considered a first priority. The problems of materials, and working capacity, are equally difficult to solve. The country does not produce enough basic materials and very few, and insufficient, finishing materials of conventional quality. By that we mean: construction timber; cement and lime; steel in any form - bars, sheet or piping; building brick, tiles and clay pipes; sanitary ware; paints and varnishes; ironmongery; glass; nails, screws, bolts, wire and netting. Tools and equipment are also virtually 100~ imported. Traditional building materials include: bamboo and c&go (reeds and thin bamboo); thatch; wooden poles and sticks; adobe; woven palm leaves; stone (not cut). These are virtually non-existent inside the towns, and every year they are available further and further away from the perimeter of towns. In Maputo, for instance, the traditional cani~o (thin bamboo), so popular and practical, has to come now from at least 70 km away and often from up to 100 km or more. It is also important to point that we do not have industrial cities - not even Maputo with nearly one million people. So we do not have industrial refuse as a source of cheap building materials. Given the high maintenance that traditional building requires, it is now in general cheaper to build in cement block or brick than in bamboo and thatch the problem is, again, not an economic one, it is a problem of availability of materials. The country has theoretically the capacity to produce 800,000 tons of cement per year. For reasons - that range from the War to the lack of dollars to buy spare parts, transportation, technology and raw materials - we are producing only about 200,000 tons, of which we must export some to obtain foreign currency. Given the policy of reserving basic materials for development and infrastructure projects, what remains for sale to the public is very little indeed. The same applies to the other materials produced locally. The same applies to the few imported materials and tools. Well then. If we have no urbanised land, no materials or tools, no transportation, no technical expertise or skilled labour: why should we have credit schemes?
Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique
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or self-help schemes? or cooperative schemes? or sites-and-services schemes? But we need houses. In Maputo alone, the National Buildings Administration received in 1983 some 1,567 requests for houses, in addition to the 27,802 demands registered from previous years. The administration was able to supply 1,020 houses for rental throughout 1983, i.e. less than 3.3% of the needs. Our difficulties however do not stop there. We have to think about maintenance and repairs of the existing stock. The situation is not easy to measure. We know that we do not have the organisation or the capacity to satisfy the demands; and we also know that, given the cultural profile of the population, a great part of the housing stock is in such a state that users fear to ask for repairs or maintenance, because they could be expelled for damage to state property. Our feeling is that degradation is deep and extended. We fear that we are losing more houses than the gaining from those we are building. In other words the gap between the demand and the supply of houses is widening fast and dangerously. The situation in our country is, perhaps, one of the more desperate, even if the reasons for it are to be found in the tragic evolution of the economic situation of the Third World countries and, very specially, the Southern African countries. But it is not very different from the situation in most Third World countries. What can research do to help us to get more homes for our people? What can we research about? - about the social aspects of housing? - about the technical aspects of low-cost building? - about the economics of urban development and residential investment? - about the administrative efficiency of municipal management? - about the quality and nature of training for the housing sector? - about what kind of house can fulfil the needs and limitations of a society in transition from rural to urban, from tribal to socialist? - about standards? - about statistics? - about what to research? In Mozambique, we have done some research in some of those directions and we have studied what has been done by other countries. We have carried out: anthropological studies; social analysis; technical research; economic studies; and inter-disciplinary research. We have hired people to do it for us and with us. We still have some people researching. But we have less and less houses for more urban people. We never believed that research would be the miracle that would solve our problems - but we believed that it could help. The truth is: it has not helped - as I have just proved. More and more we believe that what we need is people to help us to apply the marvellous fruits of other peoples’ research. What we need are urban planners who know how to make the most economic street layout and how to plan a city of a million people that has to live off agriculture and still be the capital of the country. What we need are architects who can help us to save materials for the construction of houses and who can design the simplest and cheapest schools, and markets, and health centres, and shops. What we need are builders who can teach us how to mix the right sort of clay and the right sort of sand to make the right sort of adobe, and to lay it the right way to make plumb walls and round vaults. What we need are people with experience to help us to run our brick factories and our cement factories. What we need are people with experience to help us to teach our people without experience. What we need is money to buy materials, and equipment and skills. Do we need more research? A researcher costs us $50,000 per annum. With
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that money, I can import the building materials needed to build 25 houses of 40 sq. m - good shelter for more than 100 Mozambicans. With that money I can buy roof sheets sufficient to cover more than 200 houses and shelter more than 1,000 Mozambicans. 1 do not want to sound negative or use demagogic processes. I know that money available for research will not be available for building material (or could it be . . .?). But I must be frank and open, and state to you that a great many research operations seem to us a disguised form of postponing the problems, a soft form of making the funds allocated to assistance return to the donor countries, an academic self-satisfying experience, a technocratic approach to socio-economic problems, a cultural paternalistic trip, an end in itself, a useless loss of time and money. But there certainly are other forms of research that have contributed and will help to solve our problem. It is in the hope that, in this Seminar, we would find positive answers and take with us ideas and guidelines, that we came to Sweden and that we agreed to participate. We came to learn and get help.