Shoddy RDP contractors face ban

Building firms to foot costs of fixing defects on houses

Contractors building substandard houses will be required to fix them on top of being banned from future reconstruction and development programme (RDP) projects, the Free State government has said.

Vowing to crack the whip against dishonest contractors, Olly Mlamleli, the provincial MEC for cooperative governance, traditional affairs and human settlements, said she would not hesitate to sue any builder refusing to correct or fix defects on RDP houses.

“Contractors that fail to do the job will be blacklisted and will be asked to fix the defects on the houses they would have built,” she told The Weekly.

“In cases of contractors that fail or refuse to fix their mistakes, we will take legal action to ensure that they are held accountable.”

In addition, the government would also retain the rectification fee – an amount of money contractors pay to the government before beginning a project as a deposit to pay for defects that might be discovered on the houses after the contractor has finished his work.

The amount is refundable once a project is completed, inspected and found to be without defects.

Mlamleli spoke as it emerged this week that the Free State government spent more than R120-million between 2011 and May 2014 repairing or rebuilding poorly built RDP houses across the province.

With an RDP house costing about R60 000 to build, the government could have built at least 2 000 more new houses with the money it used to fix the poorly built ones.

Nationally, R2 129-billion was used to repair badly built RDP houses in the period under review, according to Lindiwe Sisulu, the minister of human settlements.

Like her provincial counterpart, Sisulu has also said that she would no longer tolerate money being spent correcting the mistakes of private contractors and that any builder who puts up a substandard RDP house would in future be asked to fix it.

“If we find the developer has done something wrong, we find the developer and take him back to fix it,” Sisulu told the national parliament in Cape Town last week.

According to Sisulu, the province that had the most offending contractors was the Eastern Cape where R1.5-billion was used to repair RDP houses.

KwaZulu-Natal had the second worst shoddy builders, spending R200-million rectifying defects on RDP houses, while Gauteng used R137.7-million to fix the houses.

The Free State was at number four after spending R121.9-million improving badly built RDP houses.

According to Mlamleli, some of the defects noticed on RDP houses were mainly a result of negligence or contractors using unqualified people to do the work.

In one case, at Bluegumbosch in the eastern Free State town of QwaQwa, a contractor built houses that had only a single exit door.

The structures had to be pulled down and built anew.

In another case, at Meqheleng in Ficksburg town, again to the east of the province, 70 houses were found to be without functioning sewerage or drainage systems, among several other defects.

“These are the some of the defects that we found during our inspections,” said Mlamleli, insisting that while the government has in the past fixed such shoddily built houses this was no longer going to be the case.

She pointed out that the ANC Free State agreed at a lekgotla held last year that all departments should take tougher action against contractors who either do inferior work or fail to deliver on their contractual obligations, adding that’s what she was going to be doing from now on going forward.