Ally Angula pushes for housing reform: Moving Katutura residents ‘uptown’

Independent presidential candidate Ally Angula plans to move residents from Katutura to less populated areas of Windhoek.

This forms part of her plan to deal with the country’s housing crisis.

Angula, speaking during a presidential debate on Friday, said Windhoek suburbs with fewer residents should be densified.

“We need to densify areas that are low density, so Windhoek West, Windhoek North, those are low density areas if you look at the size of the urban [areas], and de-densify where you’ve got the high density in Katutura,” she said.

She further plans to redirect funding set aside for the government’s resettlement programme towards buying urban land.

“At this current moment, agricultural land is not our most pressing need. We need to be diverting that funding that is allocated in the budget, to the acquisition of urban land. The only way we can do that, and we can do that, it’s really just a budget allocation. And once we do that, we are addressing supply.”

Angula also wants land owned by the public sector, including government offices and ministries, to be used for housing delivery.

“We’ve got a lot of land that is owned by the public sector, by the government, either by state-owned enterprises, [or] local authorities. There’s nothing in our law that stops us from deploying that land and saying we’ve got a public interest to deliver housing to the Namibian people.”

Angula emphasised that it is a sense of willingness to address housing that is currently lacking.